Sexual Violence and Return in Indigenous Francophone and Anglophone Pacific Literatures: The Case of Dewe Gorode's L'epave (Critical Essay‪)‬

So-called 'domestic' or conjugal violence is currently emerging as a central theme in literatures across the Pacific. Given that brutal treatment of women has been a stereotype of 'savage masculinity' regularly activated in colonial representations for pragmatic imperial purposes, most writers have recognized that any such engagement with critique of domestic violence within indigenous societies is fraught. (1) The question of reaction to domestic violence is related both to the imperatives of solidarity with one's partner or group of origin and to the wider questions of the return to (or return of), Custom. This form of female scarification also raises complex and unspeakable questions of the body; of desire, pain and pleasure, of seduction, and of revenge. In earlier studies, I compared the extent to which the questions of gender were becoming significant elements in the modifications of political and social systems across the Francophone and the Anglophone Pacific. (2) Almost all of the writers who have been classed as 'indigenous' present the power relation between the sexes as a central issue but less in relation to current European categories such as sexual equality, sexual and psychological abuse, paedophilia or women's rights than in relation to their own history and society. I conclude that, as Michelle Keown argues For Samoa, the oppression of women and indeed children cannot be seen merely as a result of white hegemony or of repressive indigenous practices but must be considered in the flame of the complex dialectical exchanges between varied cultural systems. (3) This leads simultaneously, as Keown demonstrates, to a certain deconstruction of the emotional regimes and texts of love of Western society. It also deconstructs what Linda Tuhiwai Smith has called the 'Authentic, Essentialist, Deeply Spiritual' indigenous Other and the idea of a salvatory, if primitive, original and separate Customary communities. (4) A thought-provoking paper by Patrick Evans on Maori writing denounces the effects of what Witi Ihimaera has come to call 'Pakeha-style biculturalism' and examines the gap between 'the facts of material history' and the myth of the 'unharmed', ideal, if 'distant' spiritual indigeneity historically created by Pakeha. This 'compensatory and superior authenticity' constructed within a bicultural flame is seen as invented by the dominant culture and adopted by Maori writers. (5)