The two previous chapters have tracked the differences in the shared rewriting of history and of the importance of home in contemporary New Caledonian literatures, in settler literatures (to be considered more fully in later chapters), but most particularly in the three major Kanak versions of the story of the first ancestor, Kanaké/Kënâké. Very different perspectives – political, feminist, and mythico-poetical – are at work within the third spaces constructed by these Kanak rewritings of origin. Each writer, I argued, attempts to connect to a lost or buried Kanak cultural core through his/her exploration and reconstruction of history in necessary interaction with the other (European) language or voice. Yet, each writer approaches this core and this history from a different position. Gender and generation shape the third spaces created, and the particular nature of the connections with French language and culture.

The present chapter looks in greater depth at the nature of the internal splitting in the third spaces within the work of one of these indigenous writers, Déwé Gorodé. It traces her life and her coming to writing, initially in her own words. Condemning the exile and marginalization of her people that resulted from colonization, her texts look back in pain, anger, and with fierce commitment to remembering what is lost. Yet they also increasingly position themselves critically in relation to her own Kanak group and, as layers of the past resurface and circulate in the present, denounce a probable, shadowy, and age-old oppression of women within tradition that is still occurring. In the mixed and contradictory realities evoked by her work, the hidden and unsaid, the barely visible, the patterning of voices is perhaps as meaningful as what is said. However, the critical gaze remains that of an insider, and does not prevent Gorodé's writing from being the evocation of a full and intense life within the Kanak community and world view where she centres her work. Nor from being ‘unfinished business’ – on-going discoveries through writing including those of the possibilities and challenges of the proposed ‘common destiny’.