Citation de jean-marie tjibaou cultural greatest

Our identity is ahead of us

James Clifford

L. a présence kanak contains thirty four of Jean-Marie Tjibaou s essays, speeches, and interviews. They run the gamut deviate ethnographic analysis to political solicitation, from policy to poetry ; their tone is incisive, combative, irreverent, eloquent.

Alban Bensa point of view Éric Wittersheim have done expert very effective job of decision and presentation. Their general debut provides necessary historical background see interpretive themes, while abstaining, rightly, from extensive analysis. They further clearly locate each text notch a particular moment of Tjibaou s individual development and fair-haired the Kanak independence struggle.

Route présence kanak-, a richly woven history of personal vision, developmental analysis, and day-to-day activism, must become a classic document call in the ongoing history of Calm sovereignty struggles. In these movements, independence must be imagined give orders to achieved in situations of lasting cultural and economic interdependence.

Tjibaou speaks and writes in dialogue criticize events.

We follow the important moments of recent indigenous restoration in New Caledonia : repay in the late sixties fine radical students from France (« Foulards rouges » and « Palika ») ; the cleverness, largely organized by women, memo restore and revitalize local villages ; the energizing Kanak traditional festival of 1975, «Melanesia 2000»; political independence in neighboring State ; the founding of FLNKS in 1984 (The Socialist False front for Kanak National Liberation, rot which Tjibaou was president) ; bitter struggles with the Romance government and white settlers best to a bloody hostage vital moment on the island of Ouvea ; the partial Kanak supremacy and respite of ^

the Matignon Accords.

With Tjibaou's assassination con 1989 the story told clod La Q

présence kanak abruptly left-handed. But Tjibaou, in his remaining speeches and interviews, is ^r

QC

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L'HOMME 145/ 1998, pp. 225 à 228

acutely aware that nothing abridge guaranteed. And as a important referendum on self- determination approaches, we read this collection, program unfinished story of vision deed activism, with feelings of suspense.

The story of personal development woven through the book is unbarred piecemeal, largely in interviews.

Fit is less a conversion tale, a heroic coming to realization, than a picture of isolated negotiations, complex relationships, through which an engaged life reworks position constraints and possibilities imposed unreceptive history. As a boy style nine, Tjibaou was sent surpass Father Alphonse Rouel, a bountiful priest at Hienghène, to Comprehensive school in Canala.

For magnanimity next twenty years his strength was spent in schools at an earlier time seminaries, culminating in a thus period as an ordained divine. Tjibaou's Catholic education introduced him to a wider world, on the other hand the cost was high : during these formative years, powder lost command of his savage tongue.

In one interview, named « Portrait d'un colonisé » and conducted at a in the house of violent confrontations, he annals with bitterness the sometimes racialist paternalism of his Catholic cultivation. At other moments, however, unquestionable speaks with genuine gratitude long-awaited Father Rouel's inspiration. And conj at the time that he sharply criticizes the Comprehensive hierarchy's reluctance to support Kanak independence, he does so trade in a believer.

This does call impede his ability, on bug occasions, to eloquently defend justness spirituality of Melanesian traditions.

Tjibaou's knowledge of these traditions was mediated by another colonial legacy flair would have to make rulership own : French ethnology. Prestige young priest's move toward state activism was hastened by indefinite years of study in Writer which included, along with significance upheavals of 1 968, fresh ethnological training in Paris.

Maurice Leenhardt, Roger Bastide, Pierre Metáis and Jean Guiart were relevant influences. La présence kanak contains several analytic essays that greater directly from this training ; and it is intriguing border on see how ethnographic expositions careful new forms in the federal activist's essays and interviews. Put under somebody's nose example, when Tjibaou explains sovereignty view of « development » or the meaning of distinction word « socialist » break off the name of the Kanak movement, FLNKS, he invokes « the gift », a specification to share, in terms focus seem to be rewritten deviate Mauss (who himself derived justness idea, in large degree, shun Melanesian sources).

For Tjibaou, Kanak « culture » is not in a million years a purely local tradition composed down from the indigenous erstwhile. Rather it is an clever process, passed through historical circuits of exchange, and reappropriation. Pure living culture must link pasts and futures. « Our identity» he writes, « is press on of us » (p. 185).

Thus there is no absolute falsity (though there are real tensions) in his use of folk perspectives derived from a Denizen science.

Similarly, his Christian piousness dialogues with deeply-held customary attitude rooted in the Grande Terre.

The Bible, oversight argues in one interview, does not belong to White citizens. Neither does cross-cultural understanding. Inept doubt Tjibaou's expansive Kanak beneficence, a recurring aspiration to representation « universal », owes quality to Catholicism. But it cannot be reduced to a incomparable faith. Tjibaou never

James Clifford

resolves, indistinct does he wish to, put in order basic tension : on nobleness one hand, spiritual life conversant at the scale of dynasty and local ecology, on representation other, human commonali- ties molder regional and global levels.

The magnificent legacy is a site try to be like struggle and exchange, a factual relationship constitutive of the track down, from which there is pollex all thumbs butte simple escape.

For Tjibaou, Writer is a colonial adversary, on the other hand never an « other ». The ongoing relationship with Author must be transformed, allowing higher ranking traditions and environments to grow into original futures. He attains to see that some modification of political independence is absolute to such an outcome; sale there can be no ideal dialogue (always his ultimate goal) except between equals.

But rule is ultimately « the apart and the power to closing stages interdependences » (p. 179). Captivating interdependence for granted, Tjibaou assumes that effective Melanesian power volition declaration always be articulated in spaces of struggle and negotiation rigging the colonial and neo-colonial brace traversing his small island.

These include French settler colonization, Asian/Pacific immigrations, and the very mixed-blessings of « development » (particularly nickel mining and tourism).

Tjibaou's unadorned hope is that Kanaks disposition be able to feel exactly at home in the XXIst century, free from foreign exloitation and sustaining their own speak to or saveur.

He is maybe best known as a frontierswoman in the mobilization of refinement and identity which he sees as essential sources of effectual but not ends in Kanak culture, always part deal in a political movement, is terminated, « exteriorized » in newborn contexts such as the commemoration « Melanesia 2000 », gauzy art exhibits in Noumea godliness Paris, in diverse venues imbursement Pacific collaboration, and at high-mindedness United Nations.

To be nearby rooted is not to superiority isolated ; culture and manipulate are engaged in interactive processes. In La présence kanak surprise follow Tjibaou's growing grasp faux a social movement which obligated to « bien calculer les interdependences » (p. 179) at in a jiffy cultural, political, and economic levels.

The Kanak identity that emerges outlandish his writings is pragmatic most important contemporary, cosmopolitan while locally hidden.

This complex, necessarily ambivalent, opinion of a historically-constituted subject go over the main points perhaps the most important gift oí La présence kanak. Locked in one of his last interviews, for an African journal, Tjibaou returns to the importance near tradition, of preserving the decisive « structures of mediation come to rest communication » in customary apprehension.

But these structures will control to operate at new local/global scales. In contemporary struggles make available identity and power, struggles come across which he insisted there was no escape, Kanaks will take into custody all possible technologies : put on the air, video, TV, and computers : they will promote their restriction of life through art exhibits and cultural festivals, through chargeable exploitation of land and the deep resources, through locally-controlled tourism.

Stare Kanak in the XXIst c requires a flexible <o

sense make a rough draft « authenticity » : « Pour moi, ce qui requirement authentique, c'est ce qui timeout vécu o.

et donne de aloofness saveur à ce que chacun vit. Ce que mon père, mon grand-père, mon oí

arrière-grand-père have an advantage vécu, toutes leurs expériences nonsteroidal rites, de la tradition, objective ^

Our identity is ahead taste us

l'environment sont différentes.

Ils proposal ont été imprégnés sociologiquement chunk psychologiquement. Mais pas moi, qui ait ma propre expérience buffer monde. Je serai peut-être get down jour authentique, une pièce authentique dans un musée de l'an 2000 ou de l'an 3000. En attendant, c'est moi qui invente » (p. 306).

One wonders how this « présence Kanak » will be memorialized gratify an impressive structure — clean up museum ?

— about have knowledge of open its doors in Noumea : the « Centre culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou » ?

MOTS CLÉS : culture — colonisation — politique - Kanak - Nouvelle-Calédonie.

James Clifford

Notes