ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: WRITING OCEANIC BODIES: CORPOREAL REPRESENTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF DÉWÉ GORODÉ, CLAUDINE JACQUES, AND CHANTAL T. SPITZ Julia Lynne Frengs, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Valérie Orlando Department of French and Italian Oceanic women’s bodies have been objects of fascination throughout centuries of Western literature. European voyagers of the eighteenth century lauded the exotic Tahitian female body, while in the nineteenth century, the Kanak (indigenous New Caledonian) body was frequently dehumanized and regarded as uncivilized. Indeed, much Western literature prior to the second half of the twentieth century has portrayed an imagined, culturally produced Oceanic body that became a stereotype in what Edward Said would call an Orientalist discourse. This dominant Orientalist discourse has, until recently, overshadowed the voices of Oceanic peoples. This project examines the representation of the body in the texts of three contemporary Francophone Oceanic women writers who successfully communicate their individual perceptions on Oceanic identity. Since the 1980s, Kanak writer Déwé Gorodé (1949), Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques (1953), and Tahitian writer Chantal T. Spitz (1954) have produced an explicitly Oceanic perspective and style in a writing that is distinct from other French and Francophone literatures. This project examines violence, specifically sexual violence, and treatments of the damaged body in the literature of Gorodé, Jacques, and Spitz, who turn the body into a political instrument. The display of sexual violence in these works forces the body into a public position, fostering a discussion and critique of the politics of Oceanic communities. Additionally, this dissertation discusses the political body, which is often either represented as in isomorphism with the land, or as rupturing the confinement endured in colonial-imposed institutions. Also addressed are the fragile silence and enunciations of identity in the texts of Jacques, Gorodé, and Spitz. Because both the Kanak and Tahitian cultures have a strong oral tradition, the question of silence imposed by the Western privileging of the written word features heavily in Oceanic writing, but as this project will reveal, the silence that has permeated the communities of French-speaking Oceania is a complicated and delicate silence. The aim of this work is to examine contemporary configurations of an Oceanic body in the works of Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz: a body that transgresses boundaries, destabilizes myths, and refuses objectification. WRITING OCEANIC BODIES: CORPOREAL REPRESENTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF DÉWÉ GORODÉ, CLAUDINE JACQUES, AND CHANTAL T. SPITZ by Julia Lynne Frengs Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor Valérie Orlando, Chair Professor Andrea Frisch Professor Caroline Eades Professor Sarah Benharrech Professor Sangeeta Ray ©Copyright by Julia Lynne Frengs 2013 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to thank Dr. Valérie Orlando. Your honesty, guidance, and support have meant so much to me throughout my time spent at the University of Maryland. Mahalo nui loa to the University of Hawai‘i at Mnoa. Working in Oceania has provided me with so much insight and so many scholarly opportunities. Thank you to the Department of French and Italian, as well as to the Center for Pacific Island Studies, who have held several conferences and lectures on Oceania and Oceanic literature. Thank you to the Hamilton Pacific Collection at the University of Hawai‘i Libraries, without whose rare and precious works writing this dissertation would not have been possible. Thank you to the members of my committee, who have been supportive of me throughout my time at the University of Maryland, especially in dealing with me through correspondence. Thank you for the time you have spent reading my work, for the wonderful classes I was able to take during the one and half years that I was physically located in Maryland, and for the encouragement throughout the dissertation-writing process. Finally, thank you to my enormously supportive family and friends. Thank you especially to my loving husband, Matthew Frengs, and to my parents, who have supported me emotionally, financially, and intellectually throughout this process. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter I: The Instigation and Perpetuation of the Mythical Oceanic Body……………………..…30 Chapter II: Writing the Damaged Oceanic Body…………………………………………….…........88 Chapter III: Writing Ecological and Institutionalized Bodies…………………………………….…141 Chapter IV: Writing the Silent Oceanic Body…………………………………………………….…196 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...........…245 Glossary…………………………………………………………………….….…….....256 References…………………………………………………………………....………...259 Introduction “les femmes de chez nous ont de longs cheveux de beaux cheveux tu dois toujours les soigner tu ne dois jamais les couper si tu veux rester une femme de chez nous.” (Elles, terre d’enfance: Roman à deux encres 85) “the women from our country have long hair beautiful hair you always have to take care of it you can never cut it if you want to stay a woman from here.” The character of the grandmother in Chantal T. Spitz’s most recent novel, published in 2011, insists to her granddaughter that for a woman, Tahitian identity is intricately linked to the body. Yet, rather than conform to the romanticist discourse that has surrounded the female Oceanic body since the eighteenth century, the character succeeds in subverting the gaze of the Other by representing the Tahitian female body through her own eyes, and in a language that does not objectify the body but valorizes it for its specificity. As Samoan writer Albert Wendt notes in “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” “much of what has been considered “decoration or “adornment” by outsiders has to do with identity (individual-aiga-group), status, age, religious beliefs, relationships to other art forms and the community and not to do with prettying yourself” (400).1 Indeed, representations of (and on) the body are profoundly connected to understandings of identity and meaning in Oceania, and not necessarily to the desire to be aesthetically appealing.2 In the introduction to his work The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, philosopher Mark Johnson posits: “meaning grows from our visceral connections to life and the bodily conditions of life. We are born into the world as creatures of the flesh, and it is through our bodily perceptions, movements, emotions, and 1 feelings that meaning becomes possible and takes the forms it does” (ix). Johnson seeks to dispel the “current misconception” (xi) that the mind is disembodied and that thinking transcends feeling. Meaning is entirely relational and is formed through corporeal connections. He reminds us: “…body-based intersubjectivity – our being with others via bodily expression, gesture, imitation, and interaction – is constitutive of our very identity from our earliest days, and it is the birthplace of meaning” (51). While Johnson insists that the body is the birthplace of meaning, Daniel Punday observes that the body is not only an essential frame of reference for human meaning making, but it is also our reference point as readers of narratives. In Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology, Punday insists that our encounter with texts is always mediated by corporeality: Narrative is corporeal not simply because it needs to use character bodies as a natural part of the stories that it tells, but also because the very ways in which we think about narrative reflect the paradoxes of the body – its ability to give rise to and resist pattern, its position in the world and outside of it, and so on. Narrative, then, always first and foremost depends upon a corporeal hermeneutics – a theory of how the text can be meaningfully articulated through the body… (15). Like Johnson, Punday insists that the way we make meaning is through the physical, and because of this, the way we understand a text is also negotiated through our bodies. These formulations of understanding as corporeal allow us to regard the texts of three Oceanic women writers, Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz with a corporeal hermeneutics in mind, especially in light of the representations of the Oceanic body that have (inadvertently) deposited grave misconceptions in the minds of readers for over two centuries. 2 While this project focuses on the representation of the body in the works of three contemporary Oceanic women writers, I find it indispensible to situate the analysis of the body in Oceanic literature within a larger framework. I will therefore begin this project with an investigation of the representation of the Oceanic body in the literary works of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century French writers. As I will demonstrate in Chapter One: The Instigation and Perpetuation of the Mythical Oceanic Body, both the female and the male Oceanic bodies have been fetishized and romanticized in the Western imaginary throughout centuries of Western literature, and looking at corporeality within this literature helps to shed light on the images the Oceanic authors in question attempt to bifurcate. As far back in history