Vārua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Kareva Mateata-Allain and Alexander Dale Mawyer.

Vārua Tupu — the first anthology of its kind — offers English-speaking readers the stories, memoirs, poetry, photography, and paintings of a French Polynesian artistic community that has been growing in strength since the 1960s. In the literature and images of Vārua Tupu, the people of this astonishing group of islands speak for themselves.

The art includes work by such artists as Michel Chansin, Bobby Holcomb, Michel Ko, Claire Leimbach, and Marie-Helene Villierme.

Writers contributing works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and memoir include Louise Peltzer, Flora Devatine, Taaria Walker, Rai a Mai, Henri Hiro, Patrick Araia Amaru, Bruno Saura, John Lind, Celestine Hitiura Vaite, Titaua Peu, and Kareva Mateata-Allain. Translators include Nola Accili, Anne-Marie Coeroli-Green, Jean Toyama, and Mateata-Allain.

Presidentʻs message

Vārua Tupu is a welcome sign that the obstacles dividing Tahiti from the rest of Pasifika are rapidly being overcome. Even the barrier of language no longer need divide us from one another. We all belong to the Pacific, as brothers, sisters, and cousins, and it is significant that we are able to travel freely across the reef, physically and through the imaginations of our artists, and get to know one another again.
     The voices of indigenous people of French Polynesia can be heard for the first time in English in this volume, and our faces and Island way of life can be seen in the wonderful art. We hope projects such as this one will strengthen the goodwill and friendship that exist among Island people, and will bring us and our posterity closer together for many years to come.

Oscar Temaru, President, French Polynesia

216 pp., winter 2005 (17:2), $29
ISBN 978-0-8248-3019-9
Project Muse
JSTOR