Session VI: Global Subversions
Katherine Stevenson (Jamestown College, Jamestown ND): "Deracination and Cultural Trespass in Hombo by Chantal Spitz"
French Polynesian literature is both a postcolonial literature of a culturally unique South Pacific island nation and a subset of contemporary French literary production. One of the most prominent and outspoken contemporary writers in French Polynesia is Chantal Spitz, author of the first novel published by a Maòhi author in French Polynesia. Her first novel, L’île des rêves ecrasées, first appeared in 1991, followed by Hombo: Transcription d’une biographie in 2002. The first novel takes French nuclear policy in French Polynesia to task and was part of the mass protests against nuclear testing in French Polynesia. Her second novel treats a profound social challenge in modern French Polynesia, the deracination of young people from island cultural traditions and the cultural, social and legal fallout of culture clashes between island culture and the laws, technology and educational systems imported from France.
Spitz writes using Maòhi-inspired turns of phrase, images from the islands and linguistic rhythms that evoke the poetry of a people with a strong oral tradition in storytelling.
The main character of the novel is the Hombo of the book’s title, a young man whose childhood is spent in a traditional Maòhi-speaking home but who enters a foreign French-speaking environment when he begins school. He becomes a hombo, one of the lost generation of young men who lose their own culture, yet do not fully understand the workings of the dominant colonial culture that holds the key to economic survival. Ultimately, he drifts toward criminality and loses his way.