(Dés)illusion d'authenticité et d'autochtonie chez Chantal T. Spitz et Rai Chaze

Abstract

In the francophone literature of French Polynesia, the search for means of linguistic expression of the autochthonous population in their own texts has taken on different forms since the 1990s. According to the Mā’ohi researcher Bruno Saura, autochthony is understood to mean the premature descent of a person from a specific geographical location, which can be established earlier than other immigrants. The colonial context plays a decisive role in this case. The article examines the emotional and historical connection of the Mā’ohi writers Chantal T. Spitz and Rai Chaze with the Polynesian Islands. In her first works (L’île des rêves écrasés (1991) and Vai. La rivière au ciel sans nuages (1990)), they depict both the wounds of colonial conquest and the traditional rites that characterize the indigenous population, such as the symbol of the burial of the placenta of a newborn to nourish a tree that binds the child to the land with its roots and also nourishes it. In Spitz's more recent text Cartes postales (2015), however, it becomes clear that there are also social disturbances and problems in a presumed harmonious Polynesian community. Imagined illusion and realistic disillusionment are close together.