The previous chapters looked at two different kinds of hybrid texts that have resulted from European-Kanak contact: the texts of the European explorers in the eighteenth century and the translations into French of texts of oral tradition in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The present chapter extends the examination of the hybridity of New Caledonian culture(s), their mix of differences and commonalities, by considering the respective approaches to a trope present in the work of every group of writers, from the colonial period to the postcolonial present. This is the theme of exile, or living in-between the lost home, where one is not, and a home to come. The themes of exile and home have a second face in New Caledonian literatures, a staking out of claims for the periphery (the island) against the centre (the Continent or Europe). For both Settler and Kanak, remembering the condition of exile or of exilic hybridity is simultaneously a political positioning.

The Pacific has been criss-crossed by major population movements for more than 3,000 years, from the earliest migrations of Austronesianspeaking peoples, later marked by the spread of distinctive Lapita pottery, to the Polynesian voyages from ‘Hawaiiki’ to New Zealand beginning around the tenth century. In a later chapter we will look again at the figure of the waka or great seafaring canoe of the voyaging ancestors that continues to construct the region imaginatively as a shared contemporary symbol of the foundation of indigenous Pacific identity. In Gens de pirogue et gens de la terre: les fondements géographiques d'une identité [Peoples of the Canoe and Peoples of the Land: The Geographical Foundations of an Identity], Joël Bonnemaison shows that in Vanuatu, for example, the population comes to see the land as ‘a segment of a route, an articulated system of trees and pirogues. The tree is the metaphor for Man. The man-tree lives by the group-pirogue, which thanks to its journeys, gives him the openings and alliances necessary for his survival and his reproduction’.