Écritures de la transe dans la littérature francophone autodiégétique de la Polynésie française au XXIe siècle : entre expression de l’autochtonie et revenance traumatique

Abstract

• In the literary panorama of the French-speaking islands of the Pacific, the works of writers such as Chantal Spitz or Titaua Peu have extensively explored the traumatic representations of a bruised Polynesian indigeneity, often seen in an “enargic” writing, which links the theme of trauma with those of identity claims and anti-colonialist protest. Some works by other indigenous authors, however, less openly fictionalized, practice a writing apparently less agonistic, where the reconstruction of the personal and community past tries to develop as a place to reconquest the indigenous subjectivity: this is the case of Rurutu, Mémoires d’avenir d’une île australe (Rurutu, Prospective Memoirs Of A Southern Island) by Ta’aria Walker (1999), of the fictionalized biography of Sunny Moana’ura Walker, entitled Le Païen (The Pagan) and written by the Tahitian-born writer Ariirau (2017), as well as of Moetai Brotherson’s first-person novel Le Roi absent (The Absent King) (2007). Faced with these generally autodiegetic narratives that seem to recompose the indigenous self through the literary figuration of memory, without necessarily inscribing it in a relationship of frontal opposition to colonial otherness, the hypothesis we would like to examine is that of an almost invisible persistence of trauma, whose clues can paradoxically be perceived through the narration of experiences claimed as specifically indigenous. The irruption of trance, in particular, both as a narrative motive and as a scriptural experience, becomes, in these works, the space of an ambiguous recreation of indigenous consciousness, where the unspeakable colonial intrusion, almost impossible to represent, leaves its traumatic trace directly in the very gesture of literary expression of indigeneity.