The heroine of your novel, Tass, is a young Caledonian woman who decides to return to live all year in New Caledonia after a romantic breakup. And at the beginning of the novel, she says that in metropolitan France, she was asked few questions about the territory where she grew up. Is this out of embarrassment linked to the past?
Alice Zeniter: “When you know absolutely nothing about a territory, you would have to start all over again. What did we go and do in that part of the Pacific? Why did we take an archipelago that is a piece of paradise with beauty that is sometimes so intense that it is violent and turn it into a penal colony? What happened in this story and how is it that this territory is still part of France and at the same time on the UN list of territories to be decolonized? What do we do with that? How do we feel about that? And so yes, we say to ourselves that there is probably an immense embarrassment about this colonial history that we do not know and that ignores this archipelago.”
Why wasn’t he really taught Caledonian history when he was young?
Alice Zeniter: “In reality, she was not taught the history of her territory because the French republican school advocated an identical program for all children, whether they were from metropolitan France or an overseas territory. And so, my heroine had to learn things about Reims, Rouen and Dijon but not about the Pacific zone in which she grew up.“.
Your heroine, Tass, thinks that this is perhaps linked to the fact that there was a lack of heroes among the Caledonians of European origin?
Alice Zeniter: “Yes, among the somewhat well-known figures of New Caledonia, there is Chief Ataï who led the great revolt in 1878, but he is a Kanak chief who rebelled against the French. There is Karembeu who is a football player who is also a Kanak from Lifou. There are the great assassinated pro-independence political leaders who sometimes acquired the status of martyr. But on the White side, we have many merchant dynasties. We have prison directors. We have people who ran trading posts and perhaps that is less talked about“.
Is breaking the colonial epic ultimately your whole job?
Alice Zeniter: “In the case of New Caledonia, there is also the fact of recalling that this colonial history is a tiny part of the history of the territory. The colonial history begins in the 1850s, when Admiral d’Entrecasteaux seized New Caledonia in the name of France. But at that time, this archipelago was already populated by the Kanaks who also have a history. And in addition, the history of the Kanaks is very rich, because with the systems of alliances between clans, wars and customs, there are many things to tell. However, when the French arrive, they act as if the archipelago was empty, new. They act as if the French built everything. As if we could tell everything from the arrival of the French, as if they were year zero. In the book, the aim is to try to broaden the framework. Colonial history is a few lines in the great history of the Pacific“.
Alice Zeniter made ofThe colonial question and the question of domination are a common thread in her literary work. The 37-year-old author has in fact addressed the Algerian War at the heart of her novel “The art of losing” which earned her the Goncourt des Lycéens prize. Alice Zeniter is born to a father of Algerian origin and a French mother.
