Author with an eminently political commitment, Titaua Peu writes a realistic Polynesian society, far from illusory clichés. She represents one of the main French-speaking voices of Pacific literature. Mutisms, her first novel, published in 2003, made her the youngest Tahitian author to be published. pinahis second novel, Prix Eugène Dabit 2017, winner of the French Voices – Award Grand Prize in Fiction 2019 competition, was published in the United States in 2022 by Restless Book.
“Silences, for all these silences that have undermined the Polynesian soul…”
Taboos and things left unsaid, frustrations and conflicts, gray areas and silences. So many evils that plagued Polynesian society from the 1980s to 2000.
Faced with the tragedies that upset her life, from her childhood exposed to the violence of her father, to adolescence marked by departures and uprooting, while atolls were defiled by nuclear fire from a mother country whose motherland she ignores everything, this young girl doubts her faith in humanity. Only his admiration for Rori, an independentist political activist with undeniable charisma, manages to make him smile again and breathe meaning into his life. But love cannot blind you wildly: he will have to go into exile 22,000 kilometers away, to this foreign French land, to find the strength to put words to the unspeakable. And try to (re)write the history of his country.
With this social and initiatory novel, Titaua Peu sets out to put words on the silences, to create speech where it has been confiscated, forgotten. The author of Pina (Prix Eugène Dabit in 2017) has never had terms as accurate as when she evokes silences, underlining the unsaid and the taboos of a society in perdition.
Mū, nc Tahitian: silence of someone who has something to say but is silent. (Dictionary of the Tahitian Academy – Fare Vāna’a) (Presentation of Editions Au Vent des Îles)