The Three Versions of Kanaké

Most of the histories examined in the last chapter reconstruct origins and memory with present socio-political ends in mind. All derive from nostalgia for a past and present home, and seek to establish roots and legitimacy by reconstituting a New Caledonian history that guarantees their community its own place, cultural specificity, and centrality. The dialectic between literature and history, between European and New Caledonian homes, refashions the sense of history in these texts: a (hi) story that is more about a distinctive (group), a political message, and an ethical vision of the future than a faithful reproduction of a past society and its relations of power. In their parallel explorations of the possibilities and problems of a Common Destiny, the gains and losses of a bi- or multicultural society, and inherent dissymmetry of such a society, contemporary literary texts increasingly engage with issues of difference.

The shared hybrid condition of living between different worlds (Europe and New Caledonia), cultures (French and Kanak), or between story and history does seem to allow for the development of double alliances, critical perspectives, and new third spaces across the two main cultures. Telling the past in the literatures of New Caledonia is a form of identity construction, but these identities are themselves multiple and shifting, political, and personal.

The depictions of the epic (and sometimes poor) settler – in early colonial novels as in Régent, Jacques, or even Kurtovitch's work in the present – feature fictional protagonists increasingly in cultural interaction with Kanak characters. Three modern Kanak versions of the foundational story of Téâ Kanaké set up this First Ancestor in competition with the figure of the Explorer and the Pioneer for the place of First Man. These Kanak stories, from Jean-Marie Tjibaou's first recreation of the founding figure of Kanake to Déwé Gorodé's or Denis Pourawa's more recent versions, are characterized as different from European texts, marked dramatically by the aesthetic and performance forms of oral history. All three are also very different from one another.