Despite Gorodé's resolute centring and valuing of an indigenous vision of the world, L'Epave [The Wreck] stands apart from the work of other Pacific writers, not the least for its mordant image of the ancestral canoe become a wreck. This canoe, solidified, metamorphosed into a black rock in the shape of a prow in the tribe's canoe graveyard, a metonym of the wreckage that strews the novel, is the site of the violation of barely pubescent girls, over generations, by the cannibal ogre-ancestor.

The functioning of the canoe and its proliferating avatars as a synecdoche for incest in Gorodé's first published Kanak novel situates it at a critical edge in the current Pacific debates on the (im)possibilities of a return to indigenous Tradition. Contemporary writers Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Alan Duff from New Zealand, like the Samoan writers Albert Wendt and Sia Fiegel, or Titaua Peu from French Polynesia, among others, share Gorodé's concern with a customary society compromised by sexual violence. Yet, for all these writers, as I argued earlier (Ramsay, 2009), the ancestral canoe, criss-crossing the Pacific, remains at the least a figure of navigation skills, courage, and proud heritage, and at the most the sacred canoe-stone, synonymous with the great spiritual power of the first ancestor and the living spirit of the land. However, Gorodé's pervasive metaphors of wrecks, beginning with young Tom's dream of the waka containing an old fisherman about to be dashed on the rocks, as an old man (old Tom) stretches out a sticky hand to the young man pursued by a shark, build a startling picture of a present custom, hybridized by colonization, Christianity, and late global modernity from the outside, but also divided from within. The ancestor, here, is both the helping hand and the pursuing shark. One of the characters, Tom's trainee-soldier cousin, gives a partial explanation of the image, understanding that the fisherman is the ‘god of canoes’, the ancestor ‘who sticks to the skin’ (8), warning Tom about the young man's imminent death, from malevolence or possession, or in retaliation for age-old abuses or conflicts of which he has little conscious awareness. Like the clashing images of surrealism, this opening dream is characterized by its strangeness and by its cognitive dissonance.