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Introduced and translated by Ysabelle Martineau NICOLAS KURTOVITCH AND THE CULTURAL INTERFACE IN NEW
CALEDONIA Nicolas
Kurtovitch is a prolific writer who has made great progress since the 1980's in
the quest to gain recognition for a distinctive Caledonian literature. His
writing takes on its full significance in the context of New Caledonians
history and present situation. Its inhabitants affectionately refer to New Caledonia
as "le
Caillou" (the pebble), but when Captain Cook became the first
European to tread upon Caledonian soil in 1774, lie named the island New
Caledonia: the lush, mountainous landscape remmded him of his native
Scotland. New Caledonia encompasses a main island, Grande Terre, with the
capital, Nouméa, and five secondary islands: Ouvéa, the site of a bloody
massacre in the 1980s; Lifou, Tiga, and Maré-19,000 square kilometers in all,
16,000 on Grande Terre. This small territory has close to 200,000 inhabitants,
of which almost half are Melanesians, or Kanaks, the archipelago's first
inhabitants, who settled it almost 3,000 years ago. The others are Polynesians,
Vietnamese and Indonesians, Caldoches (descendants of French settlers), and
finally, those of European origin, or Métropolitains (from
"metropolitan" or colonial France). To this day, New Caledonia is still held by the
French, and French remains the official language. French nonetheless mingles
with approximately thirty Melanesian dialects, and ethnic communities have also
held onto their languages. This living presence of other languages and other
realities has greatly infused Caledonian French. Many influences permeate Caledonian French, especially the presence of
Australian English, and a translator must be very sensitive to all of them. In
this context of colonization, the native population is known for its
resistance, which almost led to the annihilation of its own people. Having seen
their land occupied in the middle of the nineteenth century by the French, who
established a penal colony that quickly became synonymous with hell for the
settlers, the Kanaks have always resisted the occupier. Resistance often became
rebellion, and in the stormy 1980's this resistance intensified, culminating in
assassinations, seizure of villages, and destruction of farms. These
independence uprisings, led predominantly by the Kanaks, led to a compromise:
the Accords de Matignon (1988), signed by Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a Kanak hero. This event managed to
contain the unrest, if only temporarily. Unfortunately, Tjibaou vos murdered by
one of his own, who was convinced he was selling out to the French. The
assassination cast a pall over the pact. Following the 1998 Referendum, which
led to the Accords de Nouméa, there was an election of the Congrès du territoire, which led to the development of New Caledonians own
government, and also to the creation of a Traditional Senate on which the
Kanaks would sit. The Island lost its nam of Territoire d'Outre Mer (Overseas Territory), and is now an "Entité
territoriale"-a new
administrative status for France. But in June 2000, the Separatists took eight
out of fourteen seats in one province, which shows the extent to which the
issue of independence is still very much alive. France remained the inevitable
cultural reference until the eighties, but Caledonian literary production
finally freed itself from the metropolitan model, and from the exoticism into
which it had been confined until then. Caledonian can now be considered a
literature that is finally coming into its own, an "emerging
literature" in every sense of the term. It is a new literature, having existed for one and a half
centuries. Caledonian literature is also emerging in that it suites to
distinguish itself from the metropolitan model; it endeavors to challenge the
hegemony of French literature. It has given itself the institutional means to
achieve the status it has gained, while establishing its own readership,
something that is essential to any emerging literature. Nicolas Kurtovitch,
Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, Wanir Wélépane, Catherine Régent, Jacqueline
Sénès, Frédéric Ohlen, and Pierre Gope, to list only a few, writers of varying
backgrounds, are in the process of creating Caledonian literature, of shaping
it into something that will develop for generations to come. Nicolas Kurtovitch was born in 1955 in Nouméa, to a
Serbian father from Bosnia who immigrated to New Caledonia, and to a mother of
century-old Caledonian origins. Kurtovitch published two poeuy collections
early, under the naine of Slobodan: Sloboda in 1973 and Seulement des mots in
1975, the year he earned his Baccalauréat in Nouméa. He left and
pursue his studies in The encounter with the Other is central to
Kurtovitch's work. It is central thematically: the encounter with another
space, with a being originating from another world, occurs frequently. It enables
the author's imagination to grasp the new psychological and cultural spaces
that the Other represents. Each encounter with the Other is the promise of an
opening of the mind's vision. The main characters are always ready to receive
the brie flux from this small universe which is the Other into their personal
space, in which enough emptiness, enough breathing room is created to be able
to welcome him/her. The encounter with the Other is also central from a formal
point of view: Kurtovitch expresses it through the narrator, or rather, narrators,
since his stories are generally produced through embedded narration.
This permits him to imagine, with an extraordinary degree of empathy, the
experience of the Kanaks, Aboriginal peoples, Caldoches, men, women, youths,
and older people. He gathers his maternal from all reaches of life; he embraces
various points of view; his writing expresses this insular universe's
fragmentation-with its isolation on the one hand, but with its island reality,
situated at the junction of Oceanic, European and Asian cultures on the other.
This is why crossbreeding and hybridity are key concepts for analyzing his
work. |