where are we one hundred years after Paul Gauguin asked the question

Paradise Camp (2021) interrogates the colonial gaze across time and space in the Moana Pacific, and considers the Indigenous responses to the works of artist Paul Gauguin. The following text is written for and read by Mā'ohi Tahitian writer Chantal Spitz presented at the ʻPaul Gauguin héritage et confrontationsʻ conference organised at the Université de Polynésie française, 6 to 8 March 2003.

Published with the permission of Chantal T. Spitz.
Translation by Jean Anderson

where are we one hundred years after Paul Gauguin asked the question?

Chanta T. Spitz

Paul Gauguin. The name that I crashed into as a child through my parents’ anger as they complained about the French Government disfiguring the main high school, where they had sharpened their wits, and which we would have to attend later on, by renaming it Paul Gauguin High School. ‘How dare they name our school after that sexual predator,’ my father thundered. ‘A syphilitic sleaze,’ my mother cut in. ‘A real bastard... what an example for our children,’ my grandmother spat.

Paul Gauguin. The name that, along with the colonially correct Bougainville Loti Melville Segalen, wipes out the names of our ancestors chanted by each of the ties of our aufau fetii that are today eliminated. Those long woven ropes of nape that supported our memories and carried our genealogies tying us into our history attaching us to our foundations. Bougainville Loti Gauguin Melville Segalen the names that have bound us ever since into the shackling myth that holds us within a subculture a subhumanity the new names of an aufau fetii of modern times to attach us to our new foundations... a carefree people... a child-like people.

Paul Gauguin. That mythical name imbued with the multiple well-rehearsed myths Melville’s ‘cannibal Eden’ ‘Loti’s marriage’ Segalen’s ‘lapse of memory’ those reductive myths from the New Cythera to the House of Pleasure confine us to an unchangeable immovable identity reduce us to silence to absence leaving us without voice without substance... A soundless people.

Paul Gauguin. The name signed at the bottom of a notice posted in the streets of Papeete under the heading ‘Tahiti is for the French’ and written thus ‘We announce to those of our compatriots not under Chinese influence that a meeting will be held on Sunday the 23rd of this month at 8.00am in the main room of the Town Hall in order to decide what measures to take to put an end to the Chinese invasion’ a voice at this meeting of the Catholic party spewing forth a racist discourse against Chinese immigration which apparently compromises ‘the vitality of Tahiti: the yellow stain on our national flag which makes me blush in shame’ some settler alongside the white European community condemning the importance of the Chinese community and leading a virulent campaign against the ‘celestial invasion’ probably envious of the financial success of those Chinese who excel in business.

Paul Gauguin. The name that stands for the Marquesas or perhaps it’s the other way round as if a House of Pleasure and a grave were enough to wipe out a people with a thousand years of civilisation. Gauguin’s grave has thus become an essential Marquesan destination just as the Eiffel Tower in Paris giving rise to this parau paari of modern times ‘if you haven’t seen Gauguin’s grave you haven’t seen the Marquesas’ echoing the famous ‘if you haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower you haven’t seen France’.

Paul Gauguin. The name displayed plastered everywhere more than any other high school building museum restaurant cruise ship even though I can’t see however hard I try how his stay in Tahiti and then in the Marquesas has influenced our way of thinking our art. Tahiti and its islands certainly had a major influence on Gauguin his life his work as he wrote in 1892 ‘What a religion the old Oceanian religion is. What a marvel! It rattles my brain and everything that it suggests to me will certainly frighten people. And so if my old works were thought unsuitable for exhibition, what will they say about the new ones?’ Gauguin on the other hand has had no particular influence on our people. His is just one of the many western voices that have deprived us of our own expression.

Paul Gauguin. The name that has been glorified postmortem and put forward by the French government as compensation for the accusations the condemnations of administrative religious policing colonial justice systems puffed up with absolute power and boasting of having as one of its citizens such a great man an internationally-recognised artist after initially decrying a ‘bad Frenchman of questionable standing’ the ‘sad character named Gauguin, a well-known artist, enemy of God and of all that is honest’.

Paul Gauguin. The name that is everywhere as an emblematic symbol of our country although I cannot find anyone a century after his death who values the man in spite of his internationally recognised artistic genius. The comments of the few friends to whom I mentioned this presentation can be summed up as ‘so now you’re interested in that pedophile?’ or ‘he was a degenerate’ or ‘I hope you’re going to say he was a dirty racist’ or again ‘he led a life of complete debauchery’... blunt statements that undermine the illusion of a generous Gauguin defender of the Indigenous whose languages and culture he never made the slightest effort to share and that remind us of an unbalanced Gauguin at war with his administration strong defender of French settlers and occasionally of the Indigenous... whenever that fed into his acrimonious disputes.

Paul Gauguin. The name babbled by all the merchandise lying about the place the endless poor quality reproductions pareos calendars bags postcards trays writing-paper cigarette lighters churned out in the hope of a harvest of banknotes the name flourished by authors and publishers who on the pretext of the centenary swamp the shelves of the bookshops with encyclopedias analyses essays studies dreaming secretly of a bestseller the name funded by the territorial government to entice into the savage Gauguin’s footsteps money-laden cruise ship passengers with their unspoken unspeakable dreams of cannibal orgies.

Paul Gauguin. The name now linked to the title-question of his painting Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? about which he wrote in 1898 ‘I have finished a philosophical work on this theme compared to the gospel: I think it is good’ to which he will add a scathing essay entitled Modern Thought and Catholicism where he attacks State religion and society among other things. The few extracts I have chosen to read today almost make Gauguin likeable.

‘All forms of government strike me as absurd, all worship is idolatry. Although man is free to be an idiot, he is under an obligation not to be.’

‘Faced with the immense mystery that you cannot bring yourself to see as impenetrable, you cry proudly and lazily: I have found the answer! And you have replaced the impenetrable, so dear to poets and sensitive souls, with a being shaped in your own petty and miserable image, mean and unjust, particularly focused (forgive the expression) particularly focused on the arsehole of each of its little productions. And this God listens to your prayers, has his own fantasies; he is often enraged and is soothed by the prayers of one of the little creatures he brought into the world.’

‘The Catholic church: like a dirty stick, you don’t really know which end of it to grasp.’ ‘In the name of the Fatherland, men tear one another apart for vile, materialistic profit.’

‘And what are these notions of justice that State legislation is based on, if not notions of profit? Who are these judges not responsible for their judgments because they are applying the law, the right of the strongest, these judges who are supposedly without flaws, but who are egoists, paid to perform just as the executioner himself is paid? And at the same time criminal behaviour increases day by day. Does this not reveal a defective and cruel system? What is this right to punish, other than the right of the strongest?’

‘These few words are enough to explain modern society: on the one hand, people who have suffered since infancy from extreme poverty, from the disdain of others, and to whom the priest can offer as compensation, as consolation, only absolution, happiness in the afterlife, the whole guaranteed by the State. On the other hand, fat judges, the top-flight executioner, and priests as well.’

‘[Missionaries] would happily proceed [...] with the Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other: the Bible for their God, their rifle in the name of the Western civilisation which they believe they represent. We could list the names of missionaries who pressured officers into firing cannon at populations that would have resisted their influence. [...] On the other hand, in order to persuade the faithful to loosen their purse strings, the missionaries gave credence to a thousand idiotic or barbarous legends.’

‘[...] Looking at all the social classes, it would be hard to tell which of them is the best. At the highest levels people are more ferocious, more grasping, more hypocritical and less brutal: better dressed, more attractive, and therefore seemingly better. The lower levels have the same vices, but this is more excusable; we might even say uniquely excusable. Of course there are exceptions in both cases. Nevertheless charity and brotherliness are more developed at this lower level; this is because in order to understand suffering, one must suffer. As an Italian used to say: ‘Misery does not wage war against misery.’ Whereas at the upper levels we might say: birds of a feather stick together.’

Almost likeable, this Paul Gauguin. A sad little oviri in search of himself any- and everywhere looking for a peace in which to soothe his existential angst immersing himself over time in the artificial paradise of alcohol and morphine infecting himself with ulcers eczema syphilis turning bitter over financial difficulties legal disputes with the administration quarrels with the Church. Claiming to be seeking ‘the Pacific people [...] the least damaged by European civilisation’ he travelled to the Marquesas probably more attracted by the lower cost of living and the promise of thirteen-year-old girls in his bed than by tattooed former cannibals. In Atuona he makes his home just steps away from the administrative centre from the gendarmerie from the church living a life very different from the natural and primitive simplicity that he longed for in a letter to Morice ‘[...] anyway I am making a final effort by moving next month to Fatu-Hiva, an island in the Marquesas that is still practically cannibalistic. I think that in that place, the element of total savagery, the complete solitude will fire me up one last time before I die with an enthusiasm that will renew my imagination [...].’

In fact Gauguin who liked to define himself as a ‘civilised savage’ carried with him in his baggage in his paintings in his writings on all his travels even as far as the Marquesas the fantasies the wild dreams the pettiness the superiority the contradictions the neuroses of a civilised European remaining faithful to them all right up until his last breath in spite of his proclaimed desire to escape them.

Art was the very essence of Gauguin’s personality his fundamental project transcending his human conflicts. ‘I am an artist and you are right, you are not mad I am a great artist and I know it. It’s because I am one that I have endured so much suffering. To pursue my pathway, otherwise I would see myself as a bandit. Which I am anyway according to many people. But what does that matter in the end [...] You tell me it’s wrong of me to stay far away from the artistic centre. No, I’m right, I’ve known for some time what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. My artistic centre is in my brain and nowhere else and I’m strong because I have never been distracted by others and I am doing what is within me’ he wrote to Mette in 1892.

The pinnacle to which posterity has hoisted him proves he was right.

However his artistic talents did not allow him to shed any light on his existential questioning of human destiny, the symbols he used in his painting revealing psychological disturbance rather than illumination. The painting he describes in a letter to Monfreid (1898) ‘It’s a canvas measuring 4.5 metres by 1.7 metres high / The two upper corners are chrome yellow with the inscription on the left and my signature on the right like a fresco with damaged corners applied to a golden wall. Low on the right, a sleeping infant, and three crouching women. Two figures dressed in crimson are exchanging remarks; a deliberately huge figure and despite the perspective, crouched, raises its arms in the air and looks in astonishment at the two characters who are so bold as to think about their destiny. A figure in the middle is picking a fruit. Two cats near a child. A white goat. The idol, both arms raised mysteriously and rhythmically, seems to be pointing to the hereafter. The crouched figure seems to be listening to the idol; and finally an old woman near death seems to be accepting, resigned [...]; at her feet, a strange white bird holding a lizard in its claws, represents the uselessness of wasted words. All this beside a stream in the woods. In the background, the sea and the mountains of the neighbouring island.’

And in a letter to Morice: ‘Not long before the death of an old woman, a strange, stupid bird closes the poem in comparison with the inferior being and the intelligent being in the great whole that is the problem announced by the title: What are we? Daily existence. The distinct man wonders what it all means: Where do we come from? Source. Child. Life begins. Behind a tree, two sinister figures, wrapped in sad-coloured clothing, place close to the tree of knowledge their touch of colour caused by that same science in comparison with simple beings in virginal nature which could be a paradise of human conception, letting themselves enjoy life.

A masterpiece of artistic vagueness...

His essay The Catholic Church and Modern Thought falls equally short of its stated aim despite its affirmation ‘The problem: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is for a modern thinker considerably illuminated by the torch of reason alone.’

And so neither the brush nor the pen brought to Gauguin an understanding of the meaning attributed to existence.

Where are we one hundred years after Gauguin’s passing?

I will not attempt to claim I have the answer to a questioning that probably arose with the beginnings of human thought. I will try more simply to cast some light on the current situation based on two extracts from Gauguin.

‘This young girl, a child of some thirteen years of age, charmed and terrified me; what was going on in her soul? and in the contract that was so speedily drawn up and signed I hesitated in adding my modest signature, I who am almost an old man.’ Noanoa. ‘I live on 100 francs a month, I and my vahine, a young girl of thirteen and a half.’ Letter to Monfreid, April 1896. ‘It remains for me to tell you that Tahiti is still charming, that my new wife is called Pahura, that she is fourteen, that she is very debauched.’ Letter to Vallette, July 1896.

Gauguin living Loti’s marriage... as the myth requires... and thinking that it’s enough to cross the oceans and set himself up in Tahiti to allow himself to pursue unpunished criminal behaviours forbidden by the laws of his country because if this is not pedophilia as such it is at least statutory rape. The fact that girls’ sexual activity began at puberty in a society that expressed human values differently from Europeans in no way excuses those Westerners who wallowed in carnal offences forgetful of the morality they probably insisted on for their own daughters left behind at home.

One hundred years later now that our sexual practices have been turned upside down by rigid Christian morality it is fortunate that no man may any longer bed little girls of thirteen with risking legal action.

One fragment of the myth undone...

But has the whole myth collapsed yet?

Has the carefree people become a responsible people has the child-like people become an adult people in the European mind in our own?

How many insults to our intelligence do we keep hearing for example ‘What would you have done without France? What will you do without France?’ insinuating that of all the human peoples that have existed that do exist we would be the only ones incapable of creating our own sovereign destiny we who are capable of the greatest human exploit of all time we who navigated the vastness of the Pacific to find a more favourable destiny at times when European sailors pottered along the coastline from fear of falling away into the void if they crossed the line of the horizon.

Or

‘Tahitians are big children they live in the present they are incapable of projecting themselves into the future’ such a handy formula for twisting our different way of life into what is agreed to be a reprehensible flightiness although we have since the dawn of our species practised rahui on land and sea to conserve our resources when we have preserved nature’s excessive abundance in ‘apo’o tio’o against leaner times.

Better still

‘There’s no point learning Tahitian it’s better to speak French that’s the language of knowledge of opportunity it’s spoken throughout the world.’ Trying to force on us a language that squeezes our expression like shoes that are too tight a language that we understand with our minds but to which our bellies remain deaf. Trying to silence our language our languages our natural languages that identify us that make us authentic that give us roots into our community our authenticity that link us to one another make us what we are. These languages that have forever marked our connection to this land the expression of our originality by means of which we murmur explain chat gossip joke defame address argue insult dream sing learn love create build command. These uterine languages these maternal collective eternal languages in which we frolic gambol immerse ourselves in order to express ourselves to understand to know. As if one language could be more valuable than another even if it is spoken by only a few.

More and more often I hear us repeating the same things as if we need urgently to conform to the myth as if the seeds planted two hundred years ago to convert us to colonise us to educate enlighten westernise civilise us had grown into a lush tree laden with imbalances absences gloominesses blindnesses incoherences alienations complexes and other neuroses dis-comfort dis-ease that we cover up with demands that are often nebulous ambiguous sometimes esoteric.

And so in all the world’s capital cities we parade the mythical beauty of our women of our men the supreme marketing campaign to attract customers and fill planes and hotels without ever evoking the richness of our cultural and intellectual heritage centuries old or contemporary as if admitting that we are also creative beings thinking sculpting painting writing in a word humanly intelligent would show a lack of taste likely to put off potential visitors.

And so we frighten ourselves over academic underachievement supposedly linked solely to our failure to master the French language which leads to social underachievement in a modern setting where a French university degree is the one and only measure of intelligence of competence and so we throw ourselves into discarding our languages in spite of the public discourse of their most ardent defenders who in their focus on the glorious future of their offspring speak to them only in French and send them off on exchanges to perfect their English their Spanish.

And so we confine our identity to the practice of dance of tattooing of rowing and in doing this feel really Polynesian.

‘Sweet progress [...] Long ago, in Cythera, the sky was pure [...]. [...] The civilised hordes arrive and plant their flag; the fertile soil becomes arid, the rivers dry up; the endless festivities are at an end and it is a struggle for survival, unceasing labour. [...] They poison our land with their disease-laden excrement [...] sterilise the soil, degrade all that is living [...]. Everything perishes.’

One hundred years later this article published in the newspaper Les Guêpes in January 1900 could almost mark the end of three decades of nuclear experiments the consequences of which are still today denied by the self-proclamations of the French rooster cock-a-doodle-do halleluia hosanna France with its immeasurable technological genius has vitrified the radioactive waste in the coral thereby inventing the one and only clean bomb.

‘These people all go into any village they choose, by any road, sleep in any house, eat, etc., without even saying thanking, on the basis of returning the favour. And they’re called savages? They sing, never steal, my door is never closed, they don’t kill others. [...] Tahitian soil is becoming French and little by little the old ways will disappear’ he writes to Mette in May 1891.

One hundred years later we fall into a daydream on reading this description that strikes us as almost mythical we who have exchanged this subtle art of living for a concreted urbanisation runways asphalt roads traffic jams cable TV packages red lights family benefit payments independent radio stations hotels supermarkets fastfood outlets tourism social security a joyous transformation we scramble after our imaginary fading greedy copycats feverish imitators sheep flocking toward the light noise pollution consumption so as to flee the current the silence the stillness of ancestral eyes.

We the victors of the autonomous modern era sharpened by unctuous subsidies by proliferating support payments by national solidarity by social benefits by congenital Development-Aid-Social-Progress-Packages that drain us and smash us unresisting into domestic violence family dysfunction emotional deprivation alcoholic dependency drug-induced highs adolescent suicide cultural anguish language bankruptcy academic disintegration.

We of the broken minds numbed feelings formless aspirations applaud the rewriting of our history of our bloody battle losses the better to submit we dream of careers in suits and ties air conditioning in an administrative office carpeted veneered upholstered we caricature our reality into touristy cultural reconstructions into grapho-grammatical squabbles into linguistic euthanasia we craft our own decay.

One hundred years later now become French francophone exotic in our own eyes locked into a monolanguage a foreign monoculture we dress up our children on school days designated as Polynesian we folklorify ourselves for television shows authentified as Polynesian convinced that we could be something other than ourselves Polynesians Māo’hi.

Māo’hi e

They have taught you their language their way of thinking
They have given you their values their tastes
They have grown up without any great merit
You have really helped them
You have become a well-trained monkey.

Māo’hi of today you are one of
Those people who no longer know how to think
Those people who carry out orders
Those people who copy others and reject their identity
Those people who suicide their soul and sell their Land
Those people who sell off their country at cut-rate prices
Those people who admire the Foreigner
And find their neighbour superior
Those people who bow their heads to injustice
And bend over backwards for those who despise them.

Māo’hi what have they done to you?
What have you done to yourself?

Will you allow yourself to be assassinated
Without ever reacting
Without standing up for yourself
Will you help them to steal your soul
Will you help them to steal your country
Will you let yourself be killed let them make you
A man without a soul without a country?

Māo’hi of today
When you go to meet your Fathers
Tell them who you are
They will not recognise you
Pale imitation of a race
That is not theirs

Māo’hi of today
Never forget
Trained monkeys
Are always pathetic.

Ia ora
Te aroha ia nui

Tarafero Motu Maeva
Jan-Feb 2003
Text written for and read at the international conference
Paul Gauguin héritage et confrontations organised at the
Université de Polynésie française, 6 to 8 March 2003.

on Gauguin

Publishing extracts of my contribution to the international conference Gauguin héritage et confrontations would distort the structure of my thinking of the logical progression that anchor my reflection in a perception an awareness an expression that is different from those that have dominated for two centuries, and that undo the Western conformism the blindness the mindlessness that restrict us to a one-sided and indelible fiction.

The present text is in no way an attempt to justify or even less to reneg on the presentation I gave on the 6th of March every word of which was rigorously and carefully chosen without vulgarity or contempt in order to express each idea with firmness and precision making no concessions harbouring no illusions about the fantasy that the conference would be as its title stated a space for confrontation for exchange for a meeting of words of views of minds.

There was no dialogue during the conference each person clinging to his or her anxieties or certainties despite a few sketchy openings that were not able to be developed through lack of time and place but also due to an inability to hear a Tahitian voice that speaks of the ‘non-fascination of the Other’ and proposes a reading of contemporary society that is direct and unambiguous.

The violence with which some ‘academic specialists’ who have appropriated and adopted Gauguin reacted is evidence of their destabilisation their disenchantment, these people who came expecting to hear a validation of their generous colonisation confirmation of the admiration owing to Gauguin who supposedly saved our culture. It is also evidence of their arrogance and their ignorance of a people to whom they deny the right to speak ‘you have no right to speak this way’ to whom they deny the right to think ‘but how well does she know his life his work’ as if having a different and uncompromising opinion about Gauguin were some offence some crime against the West as if I had impugned the immeasurable honour granted me to frequent the Great Leaders of rightful thinking a demonstration if such were required of my – our – atavistic uneducability.

There was no dialogue on our side either each of us merely reading and delighting in the few ‘juicy’ terms used in speaking of Gauguin – syphilitic dirty bastard satyr pedophile racist sex maniac – affirming in this way the collective oral memory through which we know the painter and enjoying the whiff of scandal and separatism associated with the text that did not in fact take things that far.

Dialogue continues not to happen here or elsewhere because my text is often known in pieces or by hearsay and gives rise only to comments that range from the offended dignity of normal ‘good’ society to identity-political adoption by those who have been silenced by a system that devours our intelligence comments that allow the last part to be ignored the part that deals with our current dis-ease which is to my mind more interesting but so disturbing to those who prefer to believe consciously or unconsciously that our being looked after by the French state gives us access to humanity.

The dialogue is non-existent our thinking is made up of multiple monologues that speak of the voids the suffering Gauguin is in the end merely a pretext for us to speak out about our profound structural collapse our unfathomable deprivation.

The multiple monologues that resound in our consciousnesses are inviting us onto a pathway to the rebuilding of our personal identity of our inner selves. This rebuilding is only possible through the exposure the expression of our pain our losses our surrenders our submissions it will take place as a result of recognition by the French state but also by ourselves of the colonial reality the nuclear reality.

One day that dialogue will happen.

Tarafero Motu Maeva 31 March 2003
Text published in the journal Littérama’ohi no. 3
in the place of the requested extracts.