In 2019, an exhibition of portraits by Paul Gauguin opened at the National Gallery in London. The iconic Post-Impressionist was born in Paris in 1848, traveled widely throughout his life, and spent most of the dozen years before his death, in 1903, living in French Polynesia. For some museumgoers, the paintings Gauguin made during that latter stage of his career, paintings often featuring objectified, idealized, colonial depictions of Polynesian women and girls who are frequently nude, may be synonymous with their impressions of not only Gauguin’s art but also Polynesian culture as a whole. One of the works on loan in London was Merahi metua no Tehamana, which shows 13-year-old Teha’amana, whom Gauguin met soon after his arrival in Tahiti in 1891. That particular work is chaste — the girl wears a high-necked dress of the type that Christian missionaries of the time urged on the local population — but Gauguin’s relationship with her was not. She was his mistress, possibly even his (second) wife, according to some sources, and the first of many young Polynesian girls with whom Gauguin had sexual relationships. Unsurprisingly, the London exhibition, which opened in an era when Western societies had begun, belatedly and often belligerently, reassessing the abusive behavior of men, especially privileged and powerful ones, sparked controversy.
It was certainly not the first time that the value of art had been weighed against the values of an artist, and it wasn’t even the first time Gauguin had been the artist being reconsidered. Few seemed to argue that such a consequential figure should simply be consigned to the trash heap of history, but critics and champions alike agreed that it was no longer possible — or indeed productive — to consider the merits of Gauguin’s art without confronting the truth about his actions. The London exhibition did so partly via atypical wall texts highlighting his character flaws, whereas an early exhibition in 2017 at the Art Institute of Chicago chose to simply avoid the issue by focusing on other phases of Gauguin’s career. Individual artists, such as Kehinde Wiley, perhaps best known for painting Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, have also tried to steer the discourse around Gauguin by creating art about similar subject matter using less exploitative, more empowering lenses. Wiley made a series of paintings featuring Tahitian models who identify as neither male nor female, but rather as a third gender called Māhū. These works are redolent of Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings but emphasize their subject’s agency and individuality, rather than exaggerate their otherness within a preconceived framework.
Tahitian author Titaua Peu merits mention in this discussion as well, though not for any commentary on Gauguin per se, but rather for her characterization of Polynesian society as a whole. Peu’s 2016 novel Pina refers to Gauguin only incidentally, but in his introduction to Jeffery Zuckerman’s dynamic new English translation of the novel, poet Rajiv Mohabir calls out the Frenchman as one of many Westerners whose depictions of Tahitian people bear little resemblance to Tahitians’ lived experiences, “a controversial character who attempted to render the Pacific through the warped representations in his paintings, never revealing the power dynamics of his whiteness that enabled his rape of local women.” Mohabir’s keen critique is part of a well-argued set-up for Peu’s unstinting, unflinching hammer-blow of a novel that reveals a country and a people struggling to confront the harsh reality of an abusive patriarchy and the brutal legacy of French colonialism.
According to an elderly prognosticator Ma sought out when she became pregnant at age 36, her next child was to be a handsome boy. Instead, she got Pina, “a tiny, pitch-black baby.” Add to that the necessity of an emergency Caesarean section, and “when at long last Pina came into the world, it was hate at first sight.” Pina doesn’t receive much traditional motherly love, but what she does get in abundance is abuse, physical beatings from both parents and sexual assault from her father, Auguste, who often crawls drunkenly into bed with her and masturbates. The mistreatment takes its toll: “I’ve hated plenty of times. Some days I’ve hated my father. Some nights I’ve wanted him dead.” The novel takes its name from the eight-year-old Pina, but is just as concerned with her parents, five of her eight siblings — Moïra, Pauro, Rosa, Auguste Junior, and Hannah — plus some ancillary characters, all of whose lives are richly fleshed out.
Pina’s older sister, Rosa, is their mother’s favorite, despite the fact that all the 15-year-old wants to do is to have sex with “as many guys as possible.” Her oldest sister, 25-year-old Hannah, has lived in Paris for many years, but has never forgotten her home and her family, despite her best efforts. She “left that place to forget her life, and it keeps on coming back anyway, doing its best to get its claws back into her.” Pina is closest to her 16-year-old brother, Pauro, who helps her with the household chores, including washing the day’s laundry at the river every morning. She quickly accepts that her brother is gay and keeps his secret — “I couldn’t tell anyone, as I loved my brother too much” — knowing others in her family are not so open-minded.
Early in the novel, Auguste kills a 36-year-old woman in a drunk driving accident and ends up in a coma for weeks. In a hasty attempt at coping, Ma has sex with the dead woman’s husband, John, outside the hospital, “two weak, frightened creatures stinking of death.” Their ensuing relationship changes how Ma thinks of herself, of her family, of her dreams and desires. She had loved her husband at one time, loved the “old Auguste,” before years of taking orders as a bricklayer led to grudges, alcoholism, lying, and abuse, including one beating when she was pregnant with Auguste Junior that resulted in the baby being born early and with a twisted leg that still causes him to limp.
Pina, Pauro, and Moïra temporarily move in with their aunt and uncle after the accident and are briefly restored. “For a month, I learned what it was like to live without being slapped or even scolded,” Pina recalls. Then Auguste comes out of his coma, and according to the on-duty nurse, he is “not one bit happy to be alive again.” Auguste slowly begins to see himself as a man on a mission, like his great-grandfather, a village chief on nearby Huahine, which fought and resisted French takeover for several years after Tahiti had given in to colonization. Auguste specifically believes he is carrying out his deceased mother’s wishes, following a path she has set him upon to go after “money and the power that came of it. Economic power, political power. Sexual dominance.” While his fight may be laudable, his means are misguided and his targets often dubious, including family members he perceives to be sinners.
Auguste’s actions may be viewed as akin to those of the Christian missionaries and French colonialists who saw themselves as acting for the benefit of Polynesian society, but who were driven by selfish and delusional motivations. He feels he is righteous, “seeing to the world, to humanity as a whole,” but he is simply another zealot, as was his mother before him, and a hypocrite who employs the very vices, violence and abuse, he purports to be attacking. Peu never excuses Auguste’s actions (she repeatedly describes him as descending into madness), but the novel makes clear that he is a consequence of the crimes of the past, a raw product of generations of violence, including one horrifying beating he received as a teenager when he was bound to a coconut tree for “a full day and night.”
Peu’s disdain for colonialism and for its ramifications is lacerating. After describing its origins in the battles waged by Auguste’s ancestors, she concludes that “long or short, remote or not, all wars spare no soul; all wars are the same; all wars are unfair because all wars end in suffering, tears, the gaping void of lives that ought to have gone on.” She traces its persistence into the present, as shown in Pina’s school life when other kids don’t want “to hold the black girl’s hand” and when she is seated in the back row along with “kids from here,” behind the blond-haired children in the front row and the black-haired Chinese students in the middle. And she explores the theme from the perspective of various outside observers, including Hannah’s French boyfriend Michel, who sees only cosmetic differences between the past and the present — “The soldiers are gone, replaced by golden boys straight out of France’s fanciest business school.” — and has little sympathy for those, presumably including Gauguin a century before, who come to Tahiti solely for personal gain — “Oh! Tahiti, playground for idiots looking for something exotic.” John, Ma’s widowed lover, looks to a future after independence, though he is less than optimistic about the chances, observing that “the people here were only afraid of one thing, being free.”
Ma is also afraid of being free, but her cage is the abusive marriage she endures; the same environment her daughter Hannah fled, believing her mother had ”sacrificed herself, forever, for a man.” Peu’s depiction of Ma’s life is utterly brutal, not only in its bold depictions of violence, but in its descriptions of the effects of living in such a situation. “It’s odd, it’s terrible, but it’s true: last night the man hit you, the man seemed like utter scum, but this morning, the man is someone you’d almost want to forgive.” She includes subtle searing behavioral nuances, like how Ma adapts her outfit after getting beaten, knowing “from experience that tight clothes just squeezed her wounds and made her hurt worse.” And she doesn’t allow Ma’s situation to excuse Ma’s treatment of Pina, whom she beats with the same vehemence as she is beaten by Auguste, because “that’s what being a mother is to Ma. Making people respect her this way.” Finally Peu creates subtle ties between Tahitians’ struggle for their independence, and Ma’s struggles: “Yes, Ma could kill Auguste. Could, should. But she needed freedom for that. Freedom to take someone’s life. She needed to be strong. And Ma wasn’t. Not yet.”
Most of the novel is told by an omniscient narrator, whose identity may be surmised by the end of the story, with individual chapters focused on nearly a dozen characters plus first-person perspectives from Pina and Michel. Stylistically, Peu prepares readers for the worst by parceling out, one couplet at a time, a haunting interstitial poem, and by delaying, via a noir-ish true-crime plot twist, the novel’s resolution, though things eventually end up on an almost discordantly cheerful upbeat. (Some may consider that a mild spoiler, but given the oppressive nature of the novel, a bit of encouragement never hurts.) Zuckerman’s translation is notably steady — in the very best sense of the word — employing frequently frank, even blunt, language for scene after scene that is freighted with emotion but related almost dispassionately for greater effect.
Peu paints a powerful picture of Tahitian society in Pina, but her imagery resonates far beyond the island’s shores and the book’s cover. A drug-fueled party where young women and underage girls are being abused by uber-rich foreigners evoked the Caribbean island where Jeffery Epstein preyed on his victims. Criticisms of a police force that “didn’t understand a thing about this country that they were supposed to protect” ring uncomfortably true in 2022. As does the behavior of a justice system, and a society as a whole, that may play the piety card but rarely exhibits genuine Christian compassion in any consistent fashion. Most enduring of all, however, is Pina herself, a child whose young life is saddled with so much — too much — pain and sorrow. My reading coincided with several news cycles that were focused on the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, was forced to cross state lines to receive an abortion. It’s long past time for us as a society to stop imposing our beliefs, assumptions, and desires onto the lives of those we find unfamiliar, unwanted, or inconvenient, especially when those lives are powerless, without a voice of their own. Most of all we need to stop being unwilling to reevaluate what we think we know, and to start being open to learning about other’s lives instead of judging them.
[Published by Restless Books on August 16, 2022, 320 pages, $18.00 paperback. To read an excerpt from the beginning pages of Pina, click here.]