(Re-)Inscribing the South Pacific in the Francophone World: (Non-) Motherhood, Gendered Violence, and Infanticide in Three Oceanian Women Writers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the status of the literary production originating from New Caledonia and French Polynesia, a geographical and cultural area of the Francophone world that is often silenced in current mainstream “Francophone Studies” departments. The study of four recent novels by Tahitians Titaua Peu and Ari'irau and Caledonian Déwé Gorodé serves to demonstrate that the tropes they use to re-embody their stories re-inscribe them (and themselves) within the canons of Francophone literature and within History. These women writers suffer from several levels of exclusion, as a consequence of their gender, geographical location, positions as colonized subjects, and ethnicity. They write with the voiced intention of repairing the omissions of official, male- and Western-dominated History. Ultimately, this study's aim is to sketch a multidirectional feminist trauma theory in Francophone literature—or new networks of circulating tropes across oceans, so as to give a stronger voice to the woman writer from the South Pacific within the field of Francophone studies.