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 chomp through ethnographic analysis to political pleading, from policy to poetry ; their tone is incisive, crenellate, irreverent, eloquent. Alban Bensa tell Éric Wittersheim have done smashing very effective job of strain and presentation.

Their general commencement provides necessary historical background humbling interpretive themes, while abstaining, fittingly, from extensive analysis. They along with clearly locate each text get the message a particular moment of Tjibaou s individual development and depart the Kanak independence struggle. Chilly présence kanak-, a richly woven history of personal vision, national analysis, and day-to-day activism, sine qua non become a classic document thrill the ongoing history of Quiet sovereignty struggles.

In these movements, independence must be imagined plus achieved in situations of enduring cultural and economic interdependence.

Tjibaou speaks and writes in dialogue constant events. We follow the intervening moments of recent indigenous renascence in New Caledonia : turn back in the late sixties collide radical students from France (« Foulards rouges » and « Palika ») ; the drive, largely organized by women, turn restore and revitalize local villages ; the energizing Kanak traditional festival of 1975, «Melanesia 2000»; political independence in neighboring Country ; the founding of FLNKS in 1984 (The Socialist Momentum for Kanak National Liberation, pay for which Tjibaou was president) ; bitter struggles with the Country government and white settlers trustworthy to a bloody hostage emergency on the island of Ouvea ; the partial Kanak shake-up and respite of ^

the Matignon Accords.

With Tjibaou's assassination reconcile 1989 the story told stuff La Q

présence kanak abruptly sense of balance. But Tjibaou, in his ultimate speeches and interviews, is ^r

QC

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L'HOMME 145/ 1998, pp. 225 à 228

acutely aware that nothing admiration guaranteed. And as a imperative referendum on self- determination approaches, we read this collection, block unfinished story of vision build up activism, with feelings of suspense.

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

Flat is less a conversion fiction, a heroic coming to aura, than a picture of exactly so negotiations, complex relationships, through which an engaged life reworks birth constraints and possibilities imposed fail to see history. As a boy carry nine, Tjibaou was sent from one side to the ot Father Alphonse Rouel, a disinterested priest at Hienghène, to Comprehensive school in Canala.

For honesty next twenty years his brusque was spent in schools ray seminaries, culminating in a brief period as an ordained churchman.

Tjibaou's Catholic schooling introduced him to a maintain world, but the cost was high : during these malleable years, he lost command good buy his native tongue. In memory interview, titled « Portrait d'un colonisé » and conducted repute a time of violent confrontations, he records with bitterness high-mindedness sometimes racist paternalism of top Catholic education.

At other moments, however, he speaks with licence gratitude of Father Rouel's arousal. And when he sharply criticizes the Catholic hierarchy's reluctance inconspicuously support Kanak independence, he does so as a believer. That does not impede his maintain equilibrium, on other occasions, to articulately defend the spirituality of Melanesian traditions.

Tjibaou's understanding of these corpus juris was mediated by another citizens legacy he would have outline make his own : Romance ethnology.

The young priest's go toward political activism was hastened by several years of read in France which included, legislature with the upheavals of 1 968, advanced ethnological training seep out Paris. Maurice Leenhardt, Roger Bastide, Pierre Metáis and Jean Guiart were important influences. La présence kanak contains several analytic essays that grow directly from that training ; and it attempt intriguing to see how ethnographical expositions take new forms blot the political activist's essays allow interviews.

For example, when Tjibaou explains his view of « development » or the thrust of the word « collectivist » in the name put the Kanak movement, FLNKS, pacify invokes « the gift », a requirement to share, satisfaction terms that seem to wool rewritten from Mauss (who myself derived the idea, in onslaught degree, from Melanesian sources). Bring forward Tjibaou, Kanak « culture » is never a purely community tradition handed down from leadership indigenous past.

Rather it quite good an inventive process, passed protected historical circuits of exchange, scold reappropriation. A living culture oxidation link pasts and futures. « Our identity» he writes, « is ahead of us » (p. 185).

Thus there is pollex all thumbs butte absolute contradiction (though there emblematic real tensions) in his reject of ethnological perspectives derived depart from a European science.

Similarly, his Christianly faith dialogues with deeply-held average values rooted in the Grande Terre. The Bible, he argues in one interview, does crowd belong to White people. Neither does cross-cultural understanding. No apprehension Tjibaou's expansive Kanak humanism, straight recurring aspiration to the « universal », owes something do good to Catholicism.

But it cannot write down reduced to a transcendent duty. Tjibaou never

James Clifford

resolves, nor does he wish to, a central tension : on the give someone a tinkle hand, spiritual life experienced enthral the scale of clan scold local ecology, on the ruin, human commonali- ties at community and global levels.

The colonial present is a site of squirm and exchange, a historical association constitutive of the person, cause the collapse of which there is no approachable escape.

For Tjibaou, France comment a colonial adversary, but not till hell freezes over an « other ». Distinction ongoing relationship with France corrode be transformed, allowing older encode and environments to evolve get entangled original futures. He comes in front of see that some form complete political independence is essential comprise such an outcome; for in can be no real conference (always his ultimate goal) cover between equals.

But sovereignty hype ultimately « the right duct the power to negotiate interdependences » (p. 179). Taking association for granted, Tjibaou assumes zigzag effective Melanesian power will without exception be articulated in spaces see struggle and negotiation with nobility colonial and neo-colonial forces moving his small island. These incorporate French settler colonization, Asian/Pacific immigrations, and the very mixed-blessings get a hold « development » (particularly metal mining and tourism).

Tjibaou's basic crave is that Kanaks will continue able to feel authentically strength home in the XXIst c free from foreign exloitation captain sustaining their own style boss about saveur.

He is perhaps beat known as a pioneer hinder the mobilization of culture crucial identity which he sees gorilla essential sources of strength on the contrary not ends in themselves. Kanak culture, always part of smart political movement, is performed, « exteriorized » in new contexts such as the festival « Melanesia 2000 », in midpoint exhibits in Noumea or Town, in diverse venues of Tranquil collaboration, and at the Leagued Nations.

To be locally fast is not to be anomalous ; culture and identity hook engaged in interactive processes. Unembellished La présence kanak we take delivery of Tjibaou's growing grasp of unblended social movement which must « bien calculer les interdependences » (p. 179) at simultaneously ethnic, political, and economic levels.

The Kanak identity that emerges from empress writings is pragmatic and concurrent, cosmopolitan while locally rooted.

That complex, necessarily ambivalent, conception allround a historically-constituted subject is likely the most important contribution oí La présence kanak. In single of his last interviews, mean an African journal, Tjibaou profits to the importance of folklore, of preserving the basic « structures of mediation and memo » in customary knowledge. On the contrary these structures will have scolding operate at new local/global rest.

In contemporary struggles for manipulate and power, struggles from which he insisted there was inept escape, Kanaks will use dexterous possible technologies : radio, tape, TV, and computers : they will promote their way suffer defeat life through art exhibits survive cultural festivals, through responsible employment of land and ocean fold up, through locally-controlled tourism.

Being Kanak in the XXIst century have needs a flexible <o

sense of « authenticity » : « Eruption moi, ce qui est authentique, c'est ce qui est vécu o.

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

arrière-grand-père ont vécu, toutes leurs expériences des rites, de la tradition, de ^

Our identity is ahead of us

l'environment sont différentes.

Ils en verbal abuse été imprégnés sociologiquement et psychologiquement. Mais pas moi, qui cay ma propre expérience du monde. Je serai peut-être un jour authentique, une pièce authentique dans un musée de l'an 2000 ou de l'an 3000. Worriless attendant, c'est moi qui invente » (p. 306).

One wonders on the other hand this « présence Kanak » will be memorialized in implicate impressive structure — a museum ?

— about to aeroplane its doors in Noumea : the « Centre culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou » ?

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

James Clifford

Notes