Abstract
This article considers Oceanian women’s literature of French-expression through an ecofeminist, anticolonial lens, or through what will be termed an ‘Oceanian ecofeminist approach’. Keeping in mind Oceanian epistemological frameworks, the article examines the literary engagements of Déwé Gorodé and Imasango from Kanaky/New Caledonia and of Chantal Spitz and Rai Chaze from Te Ao Mā’ohi/French Polynesia. This article argues that while these engagements may not always resemble a Western ecofeminism, it is critical to consider Oceanian women’s voices in the ever-evolving dialogue on environmental justice and Indigenous women’s place in environmental literature, as Oceania is on the front lines of the climate crisis. These authors address the effects of settler colonialism not only on the environment, but also on the gendered socioeconomic dynamics of the Oceanian region.
Keywords
In an essay entitled ‘Indigenous Women, Feminism, and the Environmental Humanities’, Greta Gaard (2014) questions: ‘So where do indigenous women’s perspectives appear in the environmental humanities? And where is feminism in the environmental humanities?’ (p. 8). Gaard indicates that there are lacunae in the environmental humanities, most noticeably in pedagogy yet also in scholarship, when it comes to environmental spirituality, feminism, and Indigenous studies. As she contends, ‘the scholarship and activism of indigenous women and women of colour should be conspicuous’ (Gaard, 2014: 9) in the environmental justice conversations occurring in this nascent discipline, especially considering that most colonial and neo-colonial environmental encroachment takes place on Native lands. In French and francophone studies, a similar lacuna exists at the nexus of feminism, anticolonial writing, environmental concerns, and French-speaking Oceania, an understudied region of the French-speaking world. Yet the ideals of French feminist thought do not always resonate with Indigenous Oceanian women, and neither do the ways in which French feminists engage in environmental movements or depict environmental concerns in literature. Despite this dissonance, the inclusion of Oceanian women’s voices in the dialogue on ecofeminism is an ethical imperative. Gaard’s (2014) preoccupation, that the environmental humanities risk perpetuating the limitations of Western knowledge systems if they continue to ignore Indigenous epistemologies with regard to feminism and environmental issues (p. 9), is one that those involved in French and francophone environmental humanities should share. Often overlooked in francophone studies in favour of Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, or the Indian Ocean, it seems logical that francophone Oceanian concerns should be conspicuous, as Oceania is on the front lines of the climate crisis.
Gaard’s concerns regarding Indigenous feminists’ placement within the environmental humanities echo Fijian scholar Subramani’s (2001) call to Oceanian scholars and writers in ‘The Oceanic Imaginary’ to find ways to articulate and construct ‘the kaleidoscope of Oceanic cultures and [trace] diverse and complex forms of knowledge—philosophies, cartographies, languages, genealogies, and repressed knowledges’ (p. 151). Doing so would enable Oceanian writers to ‘interrogate various imagined givens—tensions such as small and large, indigeneity and introduced, identity and difference, spatial and virtual’ (Subramani, 2001: 151). In Oceania, Subramani (2001) suggests, these tensions ‘readily coalesce’ (p. 152). Indeed, the ways in which Oceanian women engage in feminist and ecofeminist dialogue are distinct and sometimes ostensibly at odds with the way Western feminists practice feminist and environmentalist principles. Oceanian scholar Raylene Ramsay (2004) remarks of Kanak author Déwé Gorodé’s early work: ‘la solidarité avec les combattants dans la lutte des cultures passe avant la lutte des sexes. La solution d’avenir ensemble semble appeler la participation des deux sexes, voire le maintien d’une certaine séparation traditionnelle des tâches’ (p. 144). For Indigenous Oceanian women, anticolonial struggles often take precedence over feminist struggles; yet while this may be true, feminist principles such as speaking out against violence towards women, the lifting up of a diversity of voices, and the protection of the environment are not necessarily always subordinate battles. 1 In a moment when the climate crisis is reaching an apex, it is crucial to consider the environmentally engaged works of francophone Pacific women writers, works that uncover invisible violence towards women and Pacific environments that affect not only this particular region, but the entire planet.
This article examines the literary engagements of Oceanian women authors whose writings have been inexorably informed by environmental violence and neo-colonial capitalist expansion. I focus on the works of Kanak/New Caledonian writers Déwé Gorodé and Imasango and Mā’ohi/French Polynesian writers Chantal Spitz and Rai Chaze, whose recurrent critiques of the environmental and social impact of French militaristic practices I propose can be read through an anticolonial ecofeminist lens. Though at times subtle, the association of environmental and anticolonial political stances with gender-based issues in these works is one that has unequivocally Oceanian characteristics: unglossed words from Indigenous languages inserted into the French-language text to destabilize the Western reader, for example, or corporeal associations with the land or other Indigenous epistemologies that some may find inconsistent with the ideals of feminism. Close analyses of these authors’ portrayals of environmental and social injustices in their regions underscore the synchronicity between environmental or ecological imperialism, gendered oppression, and the co-occurrences of racist and colonialist appropriations of Indigenous peoples and their lands in French-speaking Oceania.
Anticolonialism 2 and ecofeminism
Before analysing the works of the Oceanian authors mentioned above, I would like to clarify my use of some key terms. To begin, I find the term ‘postcolonial’ dissatisfying, although I do recognize that this term refers principally to postcolonial theoretical concepts rather than to the historical event. Kanaky/New Caledonia and Te Ao Mā’ohi/French Polynesia are technically not ‘post’ colonized. While the archipelagos both have significant autonomy compared to the French départements d’outre-mer, since annexation in 1853, New Caledonia has been considered a part of France, and citizens carry French passports. In fact, in a referendum in November of 2018, New Caledonian residents voted on independence for a third time. The vote was surprisingly close; only 56% of the population voted to remain a part of France. Likewise, in French Polynesia citizens carry French passports, and while the country is officially considered a ‘pays d’outre-mer au sein de la République’, this designation does relatively little to change its status of collectivité d’outre mer. Te Ao Mā’ohi/French Polynesia has been re-inscribed on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 2013, an interesting decision, as that same year French Polynesians voted in an autonomy candidate over the independence candidate. 3 For this reason, I prefer the term ‘anticolonial’, not insofar as it is considered the precursor to postcolonial theory, but rather as it refers to the struggle against imperial rule in a colonized country. Similar to decoloniality in its rejection of Western knowledge structures, anticolonial struggles are struggles of resistance against oppressive colonial and neo-colonial, capitalistic practices, struggles that continue today in Oceania.
With a comparable goal inasmuch as it resists oppressive, patriarchal, and capitalist practices, ecofeminism continually enters into debates surrounding its place in theory and practice. Since the 1980s, the term ‘ecofeminism’ has been used to encompass the growing political, cultural, intellectual, and activist movements that envision the domination of the environment as coterminous with the historical oppression of women. Ynestra King proclaimed in 1997 that ecofeminism was ‘the third wave of the women’s movement’ (cited in Sturgeon, 1997: 260). Despite its attempts at racial and ethnic inclusivity, however, this movement (at least regarding literature) has largely been Western, and until recently has been perceived as neglecting the considerations of women and the environment from areas that are arguably more severely affected by climate change and environmentally destructive practices by agents of the Global North. Perhaps due to the variety within ecofeminist approaches (spiritual versus materialist, for example) and lack of clarity with regard to literary theory and criticism, ecofeminist literary critiques were misunderstood, viewed as deficient in inclusivity and diversity, and hence were somewhat discredited during the 1990s. While some ecofeminists posited a special relationship between women and nature, others argued that doing so would reinforce binarisms and the false parallelism of women with nature and men with culture and reason.
In her entry ‘Ecofeminism’ in a collection of essays entitled Rethinking Nature, Margot Lauwers observes that the variety within ecofeminism ‘made it difficult for traditional dualistic academic thinking to take ecofeminism seriously’ (Lauwers, 2018: 110). She insists that at the present stage in which ecofeminism is again gaining traction, it needs to push analysis one step further by designing a new way of addressing theories, philosophies, artistic creations and spiritualties alike . . . The first shift needed is one in the global way in which we imagine and analyse the world surrounding us, by turning a dichotomized eye on things to a gaze conscious of the many ties hidden behind all things natural, humans and their evolution included. (Lauwers, 2018: 112)
In other words, ecofeminist approaches should take into consideration various forms and modes of representing women and nature, including academic and theoretical works, activism, creative works, and diverse epistemologies. Inspired by Lauwers’ suggestion to consider various ways of representing women and nature, this article aims to embrace an Oceanian ecofeminist approach. This Oceanian ecofeminist approach takes into consideration the somewhat paradoxical writings of authors who, while denouncing violence against women and nature, might also ostensibly essentialise women and nature in ways that feminists from other areas find problematic.
Kanak/New Caledonian ecofeminist engagements
In Nouméa, the capital city of Kanaky/New Caledonia, a large nickel mining factory looms over the city. Built in 1912, the Doniambo Plant, nicknamed ‘la vieille dame’, stretches into a lagoon, emitting smoke and dust, reminding residents of the omnipresence of colonial history and its modern counterparts, Western capitalist expansion and globalization. The nickel industry has left an impact on the entire archipelago, not only environmentally, through resource exploitation, deforestation, and increased pollution, but also socially through the forced relocation of the local Indigenous population, the Kanak people. The nickel booms of the late nineteenth, early twentieth, and late twentieth centuries attracted immigrants from Europe and other areas of the Pacific region, creating a situation in which the Kanak people became a minority community on their native land. The city of Nouméa was soon turned into a bustling, touristic port, earning it the nickname ‘Nouméa la blanche’. The implementation of the Indigenous Code, originally decreed in 1848 to apply to all of France’s colonies, created an inferior legal status for the Kanak people and excluded them from the city, removing them from their traditional lands and subjecting them to a reserve system until 1946. Meanwhile, Nouméa became increasingly gentrified, and is presently a favourite tourist spot for Australians and New Zealanders. Déwé Gorodé, a Kanak writer/activist and former Vice President of New Caledonia, who has been publishing poetry and short stories since the 1970s, has regularly addressed this situation in her works. 4
For decades Gorodé has been fighting for Kanak independence, but she has also been highly vocal about Kanak women’s rights. These stances converge with her environmental positions: while she might fight environmental oppression more prominently through an anticolonial framework, her feminist positions flavour her critiques, as she often denounces violence against women and against the land concurrently. In her 2011 novel Tâdo, Tâdo, wée! ou ‘No More Baby’, a woman stigmatized by her infertility becomes involved in the Kanak independence struggle, protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific (Gorodé, 2011: 85) and violence against women (Gorodé, 2011: 87). Later, she laments the changes colonialism and globalization have brought to her country, blaming multinational corporations, among other entities, for [les] catastrophes naturelles et [les] morts qui suivent la destruction de la couche d’ozone, la montée des eaux et le dérèglement climatique. Sans parler des OGM. Les plus fragiles sont les peuples insulaires, ceux du voyage, les nomades du désert, les habitants des deltas, des rives . . . (Gorodé, 2011: 253).
In this novelistic fresco of Kanaky/New Caledonia, as in her other works, women are the porte-paroles for the land and for the most severely affected human victims of climate injustices.
In a later work, Gorodé more specifically condemns the nickel mining industry. The short story ‘La vieille dame’, a title that refers to the Doniambo nickel-refining factory that overlooks the turquoise waters of the lagoon, appears in an eponymous short story collection published in 2016. While the Kanak population is one of the only Indigenous populations in the world to be a majority owner of a nickel mining project, the Koniambo mine in the Northern Province (after approximately a century of fighting for control), the 2014-2016 nickel crisis threatened Kanak independence, as ownership in a lucrative industry would have granted the Indigenous groups more economic autonomy. This crisis caused panic for Kanak independence activists. In ‘La vieille dame’, a group of activists awaits a protest against the government regarding the (European-owned) Doniambo plant in a café. One young Kanak remarks: ‘Nous ne sommes plus dupes de la “vieille dame” qui n’a toujours été pour nous, depuis plus d’un siècle, que la grand-mère du petit chaperon rouge’ (Gorodé, 2016: 57). As I note elsewhere (2018), the group of protesters remarks acerbically on the nickname, ‘which, like the code names Brigitte and Hortensia used during nuclear testing in French Polynesia, seems an attempt to paint a benign image of the Doniambo plant’ (p. 107). While ‘Gorodé highlights the paradoxical nature of the dilemma the country faces, weighing the realities of resource exploitation versus the need for economic stability in order to achieve political independence’ (Frengs, 2018: 108), she also questions the use of a female designation for a nickel mining plant that is known to affect the air quality of the capital city and to degrade natural ecosystems, forests, and the lagoon (Pasquet et al., 2016: 2). A female code name might function doubly: it both paints a benign image of the plant, and recalls patriarchal practices that view nature as female and thus as ‘virgin territory’. In New Caledonia, the mining industry insists on its commitment to fostering biodiversity and reducing its energy and climate footprint, while scientists continue to find examples of the toxic dust the mines and refineries perpetually release into the air. Essentially, as Gorodé seems to insist, the mining industry, the primary usurper of Kanak lands, is engaged in a cover-up using female nicknames, suggesting the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood is disguised in the grandmother’s clothing.
While critical of the colonial and imperial encroachment on her land embodied in the bustling capital city of Nouméa, Gorodé’s ecofeminist engagement is multiform, as she often produces elegiac poetry lauding women’s relationship to the ancestral land that once was underneath the high-rise apartment buildings and yacht marinas. In a collection published the same year as La vieille dame, she collaborates with Imasango, a métisse poet, descendant of early European settlers on her father’s side, and on her mother’s side, descendant of a Kanak and Indian couple. Se donner le pays : Paroles jumelles is a poetic dialogue between Gorodé and Imasango, written during a two-month span travelling around Kanaky, between Gorodé’s tribal land on the east coast of the island and Imasango’s home in Nouméa. In the preface to the collection, author Murielle Szac introduces the poets as ‘deux jardinières de lendemains possibles’ (Gorodé and Imasango, 2016: 7). The collection broaches the topics of the telluric power of the Grande Terre, the main island of the archipelago, the heartbreaks and divides in the country, the fear of new conflicts, the independence battle, education, sexuality, and the Nouméa Accord, which, in 1998, laid out a plan for a common destiny for the various ethnicities in the country.
Each of Imasango’s poems is met by one of Gorodé’s, making the anthology truly a collection of ‘paroles jumelles’. The subtitle of the collection is significant, as the authors frequently refer to motherhood, to the womb (le ventre), and to ‘Mother Earth’ (la terre mère); twins share a womb, and they have, at least through the gestational period, a similar if not identical intrauterine experience. The earth and the land, like a mother’s body, give life. This isomorphism of body and land is common in Oceanian Indigenous societies. As Titaua Porcher-Wiart (2015) observes, Oceanian people live in a world where all things are interconnected: ‘plant life and the human body are so intertwined that according to legend, every Kanak person knows which trunk of the forest his grandfather is descended from’ (p. 411). With regard to the myth of Mother Earth, Porcher-Wiart (2015) writes, ‘for Kanak, the earth is the supreme source of the living world, the link of a perpetual exchange between the living and the dead, between the visible and invisible’ (p. 411). It is with this epistemological framework in mind that Gorodé and Imasango’s collaborative work can be viewed as a sort of poetic ecofeminist manifesto, intertwining environmental, maternal or corporeal, and political concerns. In a poem written in Nouméa entitled ‘Arbre à paroles’, Imasango writes, ‘Déwé repense le temps/ce là-bas de la tribu/devenu quartier/ici à Nouméa/Du récit que l’on partage/jaillit/le souffle enraciné/à nos côtés/L’enfance s’installe sur nos mains/la terre frémit de lumière dense/blottie en nous/Si près à vol d’oiseau/le ciel nous prête ses pieds/donnant à l’amitié et au combat/un visage de femme et de paix’ (Gorodé and Imasango, 2016: 18). It is clear in these lines that Imasango envisions women’s role as concomitant with the protection of the earth. Similarly, in ‘Les rhizomes d’espérance’, the two authors sit on a beach in Nouméa pondering the word Quechua, likening the Kanak situation to that of the Indigenous people of South America, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Imasango (2016) uses the vocabulary of motherhood to convey the desire to help these two countries recover from colonial trauma: ‘Deux femmes deux mères/sur une natte au soleil/avec au ventre un même espoir/allaiter l’océan pacifique’ (p. 26).
Throughout the collection, poems that laud the natural beauty of the country (Imasango’s ‘Ô mon pays’ and Gorodé’s ‘Kaatâdaa’) are set alongside poems that extol women (Gorodé’s ‘Le travail des femmes: Jawé mâ ilö’; Imasango’s ‘Permanence et réciprocité’) and those that recall the anticolonial resistance of the 1980s and the current political and economic situation of a still colonized country. Towards the end of the collection, Gorodé’s (2016) ‘Journée de femmes au bord de l’histoire’ recounts a ‘day in the life’ of a Kanak woman, beginning at dawn with prayers ‘au rythme de la mer qui bat tel le cœur’ (p. 90), tracing the increasing heat as the day continues, and ending with the evening news where a government official who ‘ne parle pas la langue de bois’ (p. 92) is forced to leave his position. The poem critiques violence towards women in all areas of the globe, while following a woman doing her domestic chores, the natural sequence of the sun as background, and ends with a critique of the local government that despite years of discussions, still seems to misunderstand the Kanak people. In this poem, Gorodé also evokes the name of activist Éloi Machoro, killed in 1985 during the height of the independence battles. It is thus evident in this collection that a Kanak ecofeminism might look differently from a Western ecofeminism. While Gorodé and Imasango honour their land and envision women as pivotal in the cultivation of ‘lendemains possibles’, Gorodé acknowledges a traditional gendered labour division within the Kanak community, and Imasango envisions women as maternal figures to the country. The authors are also incisively critical of settler colonialism and of a set of French laws that put restoring Kanak sovereignty into the hands of a New Caledonian constituency that is majority non-Kanak. As Raylene Ramsay (2004) remarks of Gorodé’s earlier works, ‘les femmes kanakes chez Gorodé cherchent à devenir libres et responsables et à revendiquer des droits. Mais, surtout, elles se sentent des femmes kanakes, responsables de la génération suivante’ (p. 144). Often intertwining a vocabulary of motherhood, of female solidarity and of nature to speak about independence and anticolonial ideals, reminding the reader of the interconnectedness of the Kanak person and their environment, these authors centre Kanak women’s voices and female experiences. In French Polynesia, Chantal Spitz and Rai Chaze also feature women at the centre of their anticolonial environmental stances.
Mā’ohi feminist environmental ethics
Preceding the 1970s nickel boom in New Caledonia by not quite a decade, the move of France’s nuclear experimentation site from Algeria just after its independence in 1962 to Te Ao Mā’ohi/French Polynesia created a similar situation of displacement, although not quite as drastic, in the Society Islands. The Centre d’experimentation du Pacifique (CEP), was an equally insidious form of environmental encroachment and destruction. The French government insisted that this testing site, which took over the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa, would be benevolent, that it would provide an economic livelihood to the Mā’ohi (Indigenous French Polynesian) people, and that it would bring an influx of tourism to the archipelago. The fulfilment of the promise of economic prosperity came at a great cost to the Mā’ohi: thousands of cases of cancer due to radioactive substances dispersed throughout the biosphere were discovered, hotels and resorts destroyed land and displaced local inhabitants, and, like in Kanaky/New Caledonia, the change in the social makeup of the existing society had a devastating human toll on the Indigenous population.
These social changes affected gender roles: the authors of After Moruroa: France in the South Pacific point out that male workers on Moruroa brought their wives and children to the capital city of Papeete while they worked, effectively leaving their wives to raise their families as single parents. Women were then left to deal with church authority and the French welfare bureaucracy, social responsibilities they had previously not held (Maclellan and Chesneaux, 1998: 119). 5 The nuclear testing base also prompted the immigration of large contingents of (primarily male) Western soldiers and civilians, dramatically affecting racial and gender demographics. French colonial and military presence in the Pacific post-1962, therefore, had lasting environmental and gendered socioeconomic ramifications on the Indigenous populations of Oceania, which persist more than half a century later. In her study on gendered nationalism in French Polynesia, Deborah Elliston points out that the rapid change from a primarily subsistence economy, prior to 1960, to an economy in which women predominated in a more varied range of cash-generating labours, reveals how the ‘colonial market economy developed in and through gendered distinctions in employment possibilities and practices’ (Elliston, 2004: 612). Due to a marked preference for hiring women, often because they were more likely to have a higher education level than men, in the 1980s and 1990s women increasingly became primary income earners for their households (Elliston, 2004: 612). As a result, domestic intimate violence also increased and has since become a major concern for citizens in French Polynesia. 6
Beginning in the 1990s, Mā’ohi women writers started assuming anticolonial political stances and philosophies through literature, often taking up ecofeminist-like positions. These writers are intent on dismantling the postcard-like images of their country in order to emphasize the devastation nuclear colonialism has caused to both the environment and Mā’ohi society, with a particular focus on the new challenges women face. Chantal T. Spitz’s Cartes postales, a collection of short stories published in 2015, depicts the ‘other side of the postcard’ 7 ; in each vignette, the reader encounters Mā’ohi wom*n 8 marginalized in the undesirable neighbourhoods of Papeete, removed from the touristy areas so as not to disturb the reputation of the islands. The author is mindful to represent a variety of wom*n in this collection that denounces gender-based violence, all within the context of the ways in which they participate in a gendered colonial market economy. In the first short story, ‘Joséphine’, we encounter a 40-year-old raerae 9 forced into sex work after having been abandoned by a sexually abusive French army commander, presumably after the societal transformations of the 1960s. ‘Nadia’ depicts a French woman who has travelled to Tahiti with the goal of experiencing a perpetual ‘soleil sable sexe’ experience. Nadia becomes entangled with an abusive boyfriend, finding herself in a small studio apartment with a balcony overlooking ‘une rue gorgée de fumées/s’échappant d’engins pétardants de voitures ronflantes’ (Spitz, 2015: 25). This polluted, smoky Papeete is far from the advertised paradise she expected. It is in this miniscule studio that she will be raped, and both she and her boyfriend murdered by an intruder. In ‘Rosalie’, we meet a young woman who has found a way to enter the colonial economy by becoming impregnated and offering her babies for adoption in an insalubrious distortion of traditional Polynesian fa’a’amu adoption practices. In ‘Ne pense pas’, a woman murders her abusive husband; an abortion begins ‘La beauté du soleil’, while a death by suicide closes the story, as a woman has discovered that the abortion from the beginning of the story is a consequence of her husband’s infidelity. Each vignette depicts a distinct tragedy in the life of a wom*n character set alongside the subtle backdrop of the ramifications of colonial capitalist expansion and environmental destruction. For instance, ‘Nadia’ begins with the description of the putrid smell of the murdered bodies just steps away from the beach, ‘nouvellement/aménagé pour les croisiéristes/qui de temps à autre s’abattent sur la ville comme une colonie de bulbuls en chamade/à la poursuite du dernier bon sauvage du dernier paradis terrestre’ (Spitz, 2015: 21). While the environmental critique is discreet, especially compared to the more obvious critique in Spitz’s (1991) first novel L’île des rêves écrasés, the author reveals how the landscape of Tahiti has been transformed for the pleasure of tourists, while local women suffer in the invisible depths of the city.
Tahitian writer Rai Chaze’s works similarly critique both the ‘invisible’ destruction of Tahitian land preceding and during the construction of the CEP and the ramifications of nuclear testing. In her first published collection, Vai, la rivière au ciel sans nuages (originally published in 1990), the denunciation is explicit and extensive. The collection is constructed around the concept of vai, reo Mā’ohi for water, river, life, existence, and the verb ‘to be’. The word vai unites both a Mā’ohi ontology and the aqueous environment that surrounds the Mā’ohi people. In ‘China Blue’, a story of four pages in length, the author addresses life in Tahiti before the CEP, the construction of the airport that preceded the CEP by approximately a year, Charles de Gaulle’s announcement that nuclear testing would soon begin in Moruroa and Fangataufa, and the principal character’s discovery that she, an adolescent, has leukaemia. The story begins as would a creation story, integrating the Tahitian language, reo Mā’ohi, throughout the text: ‘A la création du monde, immortalisant son amour pour Mihia i te tai, Rahotu créa le premier arbre’ (Chaze, 2013: 34). The author describes the idyllic environment in which China grows up, near a river, where she can swim or fish as often as she likes. Suddenly, a man comes to announce the construction of the Fa’a’ā airport. 10 The author indicates that even before the construction of the CEP, the construction of the airport disturbed the quiet neighbourhood, creating not only an environmental but also a human impact: ‘Et durant une année, jour et nuit, les camions draguent les pierres de la rivière. Ils réveillent les bébés et leurs familles. Et les tupapaùs s’enfuient’ (Chaze, 2013: 35). 11 The construction of the Fa’a’ā airport, just outside of Tahiti, was one of the first indications that French immigration and increased tourism to the islands was imminent, and that social and environmental changes would be irrevocable. Immediately after the construction in Chaze’s narrative, ‘le monsieur au grand nez’ (Charles de Gaulle) announces nuclear testing: ‘Il vient avec d’autres personnes de son pays voir la bombe exploser dans le ciel pacifique des îles de la nuit. Et les hommes, chefs de la guerre, regardent le dos tourné la beauté dans l’extase de la violence’ (2013: 35). The author pointedly refers to the bomb as a type of violence against both land and bodies. When a friend calls to China to run to the river to wash out her eyes, the author intimates that the toxic destruction the CEP brings to the islands cannot be effaced, the water cannot cleanse: ‘Mais les yeux ouverts, partout on voit le feu. Ce qui n’est pas caillou est amadou, le monde étincelles et flammes, le dessin entier rouge de feu depuis le big-bang, depuis le verbe être’ (Chaze, 2013: 35). Soon, an exhausted China discovers she has leukaemia. The short story ends abruptly, in a hospital room where China’s friend lays her down gently on a white cushion. The last two sentences of the story clearly hold the bomb responsible for China’s death: ‘Dehors dans la nuit bleue, la pluie tombe. Encore cette damnée bombe.’.. (Chaze, 2013: 37). Like many Mā’ohi women authors, Chaze depicts women as the primary victims of nuclear testing and radioactive contamination, perhaps as both a literal and a metaphorical representation of the corporeal impact of nuclear testing on the environment and on gender dynamics in Oceania.
In a later novel published in 2010, Avant la saison des pluies, Chaze again brings attention to the corporeal consequences of nuclear testing. Set almost 10 years after the final test in the archipelago during a politically turbulent period in Tahiti, the novel is a complicated set of intertwined histories of three separate principal (pro-independence) characters, with the female character dominating the text. Chaze’s female characters are again ravaged by breast cancers. In the middle of the novel, Te Ua watches a documentary on cancers in Tahiti. She comments to her lover: ‘. . . nous avons cinq cents nouveaux cas de cancer par an . . . Une femme sur cinq a un cancer du sein . . . et aucun cancérologue à Tahiti! Une population se meurt et la France persiste à dire avoir eu la seule bombe inoffensive au monde!’ (Chaze, 2010: 202). The character explicitly critiques France’s inaction to provide care to its French Polynesian population and France’s refusal to acknowledge the devastation nuclear colonialism caused in the archipelago. Indeed, although in 2010 France passed a law authorizing reparations be made to victims of radiation from nuclear testing, it was not until 2016 that then-French President François Hollande vocalized the acknowledgement of the environmental and corporeal impact nuclear testing had had on the islands and their inhabitants. For years, as Tamara Bopp du Pont (1998), the only female member of the French Polynesian Territorial Assembly at the time, points out in Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearization, The French have lied, there are consequences . . . Today there are only two fish that [Indigenous people] can eat without problems. France covers by saying that it’s not nuclear testing, it’s ciguatera. It’s not radioactivity, it’s people’s way of life today. They deny that there are problems. (Bopp du Pont, 1998: 39–40)
By the end of Chaze’s novel, following the death of her grandmother and anticipating that of her mother, the female narrator questions ‘Qui ne mourrait pas de cancer dans nos îles?’ (Chaze, 2010: 308), resigned to the idea that this is the fate of her country’s citizens. Yet, while the blame rests on nuclear colonialism, she does not view France as the sole responsible actor moving forward. She cites ‘un de nos écrivains tahitiens’ (Chaze herself): Je pense que dans les années à venir, les intellectuels et les artistes seront amenés à prendre parti et cette fois, contrairement à la lutte pour l’Indépendance, nous n’aurons pas le luxe de combattre des colonisateurs. C’est nous que nous devons combattre. (Chaze, 2010: 346)
The author has the prescience to recognize that the battle to save the country rests in the hands of the Oceanian people themselves, specifically in the hands of intellectuals and artists. Essentially, for Chaze and arguably for all of the writers examined here, imaginative writing and artistic creations are forms of activism that confront what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow’ or ‘attritional violence’, bringing attention to the incremental and exponential ‘long dyings’ (Nixon, 2011: 2) of populations often ignored in an age of climate crisis. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon suggests that it is up to writer-activists to make ‘slow violence’, or the effects of contamination and pollution, visible to the wider public by tapping into the power of the human imagination. Writer activists can ‘give imaginative definition to catastrophes that often remain imperceptible to the senses, catastrophes that unfold across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the life of the human observer’ (Nixon, 2011: 15). Gorodé, Imasango, Spitz, and Chaze all create imaginative fictions that ‘give definition’ to imperceptible social catastrophes that stem from environmental abuse, engaging in an anticolonial, Oceanian ecofeminism that demonstrates how mutually reinforcing systems of oppression (racial, gendered, and colonial) have been working together over time, slowly corroding the land, contaminating the waters, and disrupting the communities that depend on this land for their very existence.
By featuring women as victims, survivors, and combatants of colonially-imposed environmental injustices, the authors examined here suggest that Oceanian women have consequential voices in a global ecofeminist dialogue. On the front lines of climate change all over the world, and particularly in the Pacific region where islands have already begun to disappear and where species extinction and resource extraction pose imminent dangers, Indigenous women have the capacity to articulate the deleterious effects of the invisible environmental violence that threatens the region. Exposing the colonialist capitalist expansion that has oppressed the Indigenous people of Oceania, significantly altered gender dynamics of the region, and both surreptitiously and blatantly destroyed Indigenous lands, Déwé Gorodé, Imasango, Chantal Spitz, and Rai Chaze render their voices indispensable to the francophone environmental humanities in an age of global climate crisis.