Tahiti
pp. 18-19 · Read in the full issue
Letter
From James Boyack
T'HE blah-blah and self-serving sophistries of the politicians seem to be everywhere in Tahiti these days. Two hundred and forty-eight would-be servants of the people are inundating the political arena with solemn promises accompanied by warnings of the im pending disaster inherent in the policies of all candidates who oppose them. Thirty Territorial Assembly seats will be allotted for five years on September 10, and to hear the various pretenders to a legislative throne, there should be 248.
I sure am lucky to be an American without franchise.
My only concern is to get 3-1 on McGovern (no money yet where the mouths are), and to scream myself hoarse at Fautaua Arena, like I did last night. There my opinion counts because I am a journalist, which means I can get close enough to the ring to make myself heard.
When my man scores, I leap as high as the second cord.
I know my place, however, and down I fall into another short-lived, nervous silence. The ring is for the fighters, political and pugilistic.
A good fight being one of the few honest things left, I prefer boxing to politics. Last night’s was the best fight I have trembled through in my seven years of staying out of the ring in Tahiti. It matched a Fijian gentleman of enormous resistance, one Maitaitini, with the hatcheting speed of a future French middleweight champion. This Gratien Tonna, a 23-year-old bundle of exploding muscle, was a wagering man’s dream made flesh. He sought incontrovertible victory by instan taneous persuasion of the senses. His style was immacu lately slaughter-house. His most engaging tool was an uppercut that swung into place like a windmilling soft ball pitcher’s knee-high striker-motion. He had a radar guided right cross which drove down like a comet onto any exposed facial area. Not to mention, before and after such onslaught, a slashing left hook which was responsible for two of the three knockdowns to em barrass Maitaitini in the second round.
But the Fijian, the middleweight champion of a no less tough nation, weathered this two-round thunderstorm.
What came after was a simple deluge, and Maitai managed to pour on a few himself. Enough to be attributed rounds 5, 6 and 7 by myself and other knowledgeable enthusiasts. Which made the breaking of his nose in the Bth an unacceptable misfortune. Cut short was that very redeeming effort—the turning of the tide, a responsibility to self which frowns at ‘no’ for an answer.
Gratien Tonna, former World Military middleweight champ, now 18-2 as a pro, earned his 17th knockout by the default of the Fijian’s nose. He slipped through the crowd in Maitaitini’s dressing room after the eight round brawl. Under his welted right eye there was a half-moon gash. His right thumb was raised, the rest of his fist shoving at the air. “C’etait bon, mon vieux.
Tres fort, toi.” You’re one strong mother, he was saying in French. What hotel you staying in? Come and have a drink with us . . .
Although the conversation collapsed in translation, Gratien needed no words for his gesture. He bent down to kiss both of the Fijian’s cheeks for the third time in 25 minutes.
Which is another reason I like boxing more than politics. Nobody kisses in politics. The loser cries on television with his dog. The winner buys the loser a drink after the fight. distaste of mine is particularly strong for local •*" politics. The punches are thrown, but not much happens. The winners don’t win much, and the losers don’t lose much. This is a French overseas territory,
a modified colony, and therein lies the problem, as well as the enormous challenge and hope for French Poly nesia’s future.
TTere is a repetitious disaccord among local poli ticians which is wearing my ears out. And good faith does prevail to the edge of political affinity, but what happens when such boundaries collapse before the moderating tide of intelligence, in the shifting of national feeling, in the face of real need? What happens to morrow?
The politics of yesterday are so much scrap paper.
The polemical barriers here are barricades, not de marcation lines. It’s the good guys and the bad guys, and ne’er the twain shall meet, or so it seems. Choose sides. The arguments of each are as appealing, and as
short-sighted, because they conveniently ignore the
virtues of the other guy’s position.
Going into this election on September 10, those who espouse autonomie interne, if not having total control of domestic affairs, firmly hold 16 of the Assembly’s 30 seats. They owned 18 earlier in their majority mandate, but lost two by defection.
The other Territorial Assembly members share in varying degree the belief that Polynesia is inalienably French. They accuse the majority of having wasted the Assembly’s time for the last five years with vapid dis cussion of an autonomy which does not confront the territory’s economic and social priorities.
The autonomists argue that without real power, with out the responsibility of making sink-or-swim decisions, it is impossible for them to influence the major trends of Polynesian life. They maintain that since the liberalising Loi Cadre of 1957, much of the political power inherited by the territory through this constitu tional reform has been side-stepped or co-opted by the central government.
PEOPLE who vote this month will probably do so with not much more understanding of what is possible than an opinion for or against autonomie interne. If only they could step back from the battlefront, to the position by circumstance (as an American) and penchant (I’m a francophile lover of Polynesia) I have chosen for myself (perhaps unfairly, I do not have to vote).
They might share with me in opinion that the only
insistent consideration should be the nourishment of Dody and spirit. This is the bed-rock of all politics.
All eyes and effort then could turn to generating that /iable economy consistent with the Polynesian way of life, which happens to be inextricably linked to French modes of thought, inexorably hooked into certain ielights of French culture, and definitely, at least since 1960 (“Mutiny on the Bounty”), meshed with the dynamics of any consumer society. No nationalism in aggressively political sense will alter this French Polynesian, and now immutable, character. No flag can make a difference. When I hear National Assembly Deputy Francis Sanford say, “We lived without France luring World War 11, we can do it again,” I wonder what he means.
To listen to the politicians, you’d think life was a lot more complicated around here than it is.
Maybe the politicians, if they have to be listened to, should try listening to each other. I refuse to believe :hat I have to be one of the few people far enough iway from the trenches to receive signals from both sides. Those political barriers need not be barricades.
Fhe two sides should stop haranguing their individual supporters and begin shouting at each other. And if ;he sound doesn’t make it over the barricades, then, ike two honest boxers seeking total but sportsmanlike /ictory—that is, without trying to kill each other—the ;wo sides should rush those barricades, overrun them, mix it up in one hearty intellectual skirmish, and then sit down and have a drink. The problems are remark ably the same on both sides of the fence, viewed from my observation post.
For example, I do not believe assembly President lohn Teariki really listened to Governor Pierre Angeli in that vindictively abbreviated inaugural spring session nf the Territorial Assembly. And vice versa.
The governor said his primary concern was the healthy expansion of French Polynesia’s economy over the years.
He said, “This expansion must not be accompanied by grave upheavals for man, his society or the natural mvironment in which he lives.” He went on to analyse jach aspect of that economy. That is the name of the game. Mr Teariki, at that moment, would have done oetter to play it than waste invective on why com munalisation is bad news. rHE assembly President did strike a disturbing note, however, one the other side seems to have under estimated. It was disturbing because it tended to dis count the French and Polynesian unity of national purpose which, in 1972, is this territory’s principal hope 'or the future. Mr Teariki said, “For a long time now, t has been customary to swear, with hand on heart, :o all Metropolitan emissaries, that the Polynesians have neen, and always will remain, ‘indefectibly’ attached to he Mother Country . . .
“Today, it must be admitted that the times are no onger those in which such ritual is entirely honest.
“Human feelings are fragile and need not survive ;hose in whom they were born. Unrequited love easily changes into indifference, and even hate.
“There are, therefore, no ‘indefectible’ attachments, neither between individuals nor collectivities.”
Mr Teariki then outlined what he said was the 15pear effort by the central government to limit rather ban increase Polynesian political liberties. He recalled that on July 5, 1970, a group of autonomist politicians warned visiting French Defence Minister Michel Debre that there was a current of opinion favourable to Poly nesian independence, albeit then small and disorganised.
Fhe political approach of the Fifth Republic to French
Polynesia was blamed for such feelings, Mr Teariki said, and the minister was warned of the consequences of the evolution of these sentiments.
The President’s inaugural speech continued, “The recent developments in Taaa unfortunately confirm the terms of this warning. They prove that certain of our compatriots, having lost hope in France, have come to the conviction that the only way to liberalise the political institutions here is to stop being French.
“The munitions theft at the army base, the prison riot, these were not only the gestures of excited youths.
These are the first violent symptoms of a political sick ness for which the central government is responsible and which only the central government can cure with the appropriate political remedies.”
The governor, who spoke next, was caught some what flat-footed by Mr Teariki’s declarations, and he seemed to commit the same error common on the other side. He did not listen sympathetically to an authorita tive opinion honestly expressed.
Instead, he invoked the spectre of “adventurers’* headed at best back to the 19th Century, and at worst, to their own suicide.
THE answer for French Polynesia, and 120,000 people do deserve an answer, is not rhetoric, but what their Overseas Territories Minister Pierre Messmer said in that same assembly hall one year ago this month.
After reviewing local economic perspectives, the present French Prime Minister said that “a study in common (between the central government and the assembly), in the spirit of mutual comprehension”—dialogue—is the answer.
Should the autonomists retain or increase their majority in September (and even were they to lose this assembly platform), the verbal bridge between Paris and Papeete, and between pro- and anti-autonomist forces here, must never become so cluttered with political charades that simple messages cease to flow.
The autonomists may not be shaping future prosperity by crying over the sour milk of the political statute, but their pleas for understanding must be heard. (And as audible must be the Messmerian concept of political evolution congruent with economic progress.) Robert Cahn, who, two weeks ago, was re-arrested (see the August letter) with an arsenal in his hideout and the demon of destruction in his heart, is a tiny voice in the wilderness, but even his tormented outcry must not be ignored. Encasing him in a French prison, which has been done, is only 99 per cent, of the solution of the problem he represents.
To my knowledge, the French are the most sophisti cated, sharp and empathetic people on earth (Francis Sanford’s rebuff at the United Nations was a local demonstration of the weight such empathy gives French opinion in the developing world).
The Polynesians are the most lovable and loving people I have ever met.
What is this talk of hate?
What the hell is wrong with all the politicians around here?
Why can’t they jump out of their rhetorical straight jackets and together meet head-on the challenging post colonial period at hand? (How will French Polynesia pay its bills when the nuclear test personnel depart in three years?) It is only with France, in the foreseeable future, that Polynesia will have a running jump into the 21st Century.
And by then, the politics of today should be scrap paper.