Henri Hiro, a seminal figure in Tahitian literature, urged his fellow Polynesians to embrace the written word and express ˗ in reo ma’ohi, French, English, or any language ˗ the soul, culture, and spirituality of the Polynesian world. After centuries of externally imposed narratives, Hiro sought to restore a voice to the vanquished and the marginalized, and to reinsert Tahiti into the historical record. But how could a society rooted in oral tradition where cultural heritage (tales, proverbs, origin myths, genealogies, etc.) was passed down through generations, particularly by the haere pō (literally “night walkers”) make the transition to a culture of writing?
Poet Flora Devatine took up this challenge as early as 1980, with her debut collection Humeurs (published under the pseudonym Vaitiare), and continued to explore it in subsequent works, including Tergiversations et rêveries de l’écriture orale (1998) and Au Vent de la piroguière. Tifaifai (2016). Through these texts, she pursued a poetics of "oral writing." This oxymoron reveals her intention to craft a tifaifai (literally, patchwork), a textual tapestry that interweaves French and reo māʻohi.
This paper proposes to analyze Devatine’s original approach to writing and to examine the aesthetic and historical foundations of her work. We hypothesize that by positioning herself in a linguistic and cultural in-between space, and through a writing marked by hesitation and exploration, Devatine creates a literary space in which a Tahitian narrative identity can emerge, an identity that serves both as an affirmation of self and a reconciliation with otherness.