et la mer pour demeure by Chantal T. Spitz (review)

Reviewed by: et la mer pour demeure by Chantal T. Spitz Eilene Hoft-March Spitz, Chantal T. et la mer pour demeure. Au vent des îles, 2022. ISBN 978-2-36734-469. Pp. 96. Seven tightly written short stories composed of breathlessly pulsating prose inhabit this volume. Spitz foregoes all punctuation, changes out narrators from one paragraph to the next, and sprinkles in unglossed Tahitian. Readers must engage with attention rather than float through a distractingly exotic landscape—which Spitz, with clear purpose, barely describes. The collection opens with “Edwin,” named for the child survivor of a conflagration that wipes out his family and leaves him disfigured. The image of Edwin’s personal, multigenerational loss serves as the frontispiece representing the cultural destruction wrought by colonization and cultural loss. “Il pleure sur le rêve” moves from three centuries of unequal struggles against colonizers to a heady independence that sags back into colonized habits: “Incapable de se défaire de la colonisation de l’esprit et du formatage de la pensée instillés ingérés intégrés par des intelligences formées aux institutions de l’envahisseur” (22). The title “et la mer pour demeure,” evocative of Tahiti’s postcard island beauty, acquires darker tones in the third story: the sea is the dwelling place of the drowned. A young man grieves the loss of his star-navigating, wave-savvy relatives, blaming himself for the surfing accident that has taken his brother. He expresses his guilt in traumatized loops articulated in stuttering phrases as he decides to drown in turn. “J’eus un pays” signals with its crisp passé simple the dispossession of the narrator’s native land by wealthy foreign investors. The description of the prototypical No Frontiers project verges on dystopia: a collection of floating islands situated in a picturesque lagoon and liberated from any laws but those of the owners’ devising. The housing proposal fails but the No Frontiers corporation gets its own island provided with electric fences, surveillance drones, private jets, and access to organ transplants. Paradise commodified and insulated from Tahitians. “Ils ne diront rien” recounts an instance of domestic violence ending in tragedy. Unusually, the perpetrator has his say in the text, making of an unimaginably harrowing murder the culmination of myriad social ills. “Louisette,” based on the author’s interview with an SDF in Papeete, documents the many short straws Louisette has drawn from family dysfunction to failed social services to street prostitution. The story’s conclusion sounds a note of cautious hope as Louisette emerges economically and temperamentally independent. In the final story, Spitz targets those Westerners—notably but not exclusively academics—who fall in love with their own superficial rendering of Tahiti, at its worst: “Le détournement de l’histoire vécue par nous écrite par eux qui s’arrogent le beau rôle” (88). Spitz nevertheless softens the critique by holding up the exemplary friendship between a Tahitian and a Westerner who grasps from her own, violently expulsed heritage how to honor unknowable differences. Poetic feat and biting critique, et la mer pour demeure also builds a narrative arc that finally “bends toward” an assertion of common humanity uncommonly expressed. [End Page 253] Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University (WI) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French