Titaua Peu, feminist and writer, breaks the taboos of a fantasized Polynesia in Pina, published in 2016. She bears witness to the rise of women’s voices in a socially and politically fixed society.
This Tahitian writer, born in 1975, breaks with the phantasmagoriated image of women and shows the other reality of Polynesian society in her novel Pina published by “Au vent des îles” in 2016. This novel highlights Polynesian women. Through the eyes of the eponymous heroine, nine years old, Pina undoes the clichés of an idealized Polynesia, to denounce all its violence, especially against women.
Titaua Peu paints the portraits of the members of this family of nine children, which combines all the miseries of Polynesian society with an oral and direct writing. She spares none of them. Auguste, the patriarch is an ultra-violent alcoholic. His wife, Ma, has suffered beatings and rapes without flinching for years. Pauro, the caring son, discovers his homosexuality when Rosa, the prettiest daughter, becomes a prostitute. Finally, Pina, victim of incest, has a tragic destiny traced out from the beginning of the novel. Titaua Peu splashes the reader with the blood, semen and tears of his characters until the hanging of the little heroine, who completes her demonstration on the brutality of Polynesian society. One last hope remains: if these children torn by violence in all its forms would help each other, perhaps they would become survivors.
The writer dares to address domestic violence and portrays Polynesian society as “frozen”, paralyzed by family, social and political conflicts. This novel was characterized as “punching”, “slapping the Polynesians in the face”. If it is very well received by the international press, this is not the case in Polynesia where it is decried.
In her first novel Mutismes, Titaua Peu already denounces what she describes as “mutism”, in the family environment and in Tahitian society, particularly around the lack of discussion about the colonial past.
This second novel, Pina, caused a scandal in Polynesia and made a name for itself as far as metropolitan France. In 2017, she received the Eugène-Dabit Prize, created in France, which is awarded to “those who prefer the common people as characters and popular circles as settings on condition that a genuine humanity emerges from them”.
Shortly afterwards, Titaua Peu confided in an interview with Télérama that she was embarking on a third novel. Although the voice of women is increasingly heard today, Titaua Peu’s work is part of a desire to make their suffering visible, particularly in Polynesia.
Supported by Air Tahiti Nui
