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Island of Shattered Dreams, by Chantal T Spitz. Translated by Jean Anderson. Wellington, nz: Huia Press, 2007. Distributed by University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-1-86969-299-5. 163 pages. Paper, us$19.00.
How difficult it is to assess a pioneering literary work. It is ahead of its time when it appears, marks an awakening occasioned by things already past, and yet is so much of its time that later readers can have trouble appreciating its significance as a contribution that cleared the way for the works and cultural conditions with which audiences today are more familiar. Chantal T Spitz is a pioneer of indigenous fiction from Tahiti, and the French version of this book, L'Île des rêves écrasés (1991), created a scandal in Papeete for blowing apart the myth of happy egalitarianism under French assimilation; for openly criticizing the complicity of local elites in the destruction of Mä'ohi culture and self-respect; and for attacking France's nuclear testing in the Pacific. A text conflicted in its own workings and centrally engaged in the social conflict of the times, the novel charts the path to a younger generation of politically aware Islanders equipped with the skills and confidence to write about their troubled worlds.
Island of Shattered Dreams tracks the love affairs and family generations of Tahitian and mixed-race people within a colonial color hierarchy, showing the struggle to maintain cultural continuity and a sense of belonging in the face of growing alienation of soul and separation from land. It moves in a present-tense flow interspersed with poetic outpourings at moments of emotional stress (births, separations, realizing new loves) and takes as its historical beginning the departure of the son, Tematua, to fight for France in World War Two. This and the subsequent movements...