While Peu’s use of an omniscient, third-person narrator creates a certain distance for most of the novel, this is occasionally interrupted by interspersing it with Pina’s first-person narration. These changes in voice and perspective sometimes mark a chapter change, but more often than not, Peu abruptly switches from the first person to the third even between paragraphs. At times, this is artfully done, such as when Pina suddenly catches her older brother Pauro going off to have sex with a male stranger. Pina's anxious reflections are quickly juxtaposed in the next paragraph by jutting into Pauro's perspective, delivered in the third person, and Pina's first-person narration does not return for the rest of the chapter:
I thought about it over and over for what felt like hours. How would I ever tell him that I’d seen them, him and the other man? That older man who’d had such a wide, honest smile?
On the beach, they weren’t so close together anymore. Pauro especially. He was distant at moments, quiet. The other one’s name was François, and he was a métro. This guy all the way from France and Pauro had only known each other a couple of weeks. Pauro hadn’t ever put any of it into words. It was just an odd new state of being. He was aware that this was wrong, taboo. But then again there was this pleasure. The odd pleasure of being hugged by someone the same sex as himself. Flat stomach, strong arms, a body that was both manly and gentle. A man’s thighs next to his own, their penises rubbing, touching.
In the beginning, while attempting to read Pina, I found the abrupt changes in perspective jarring. I could not understand exactly how a young girl like Pina would suddenly be able to intrude into the minds of her brothers, parents, and even strangers she barely knew. I also did not understand why Pina’s voice, her judgments, or her perspectives were necessary to the narrative, particularly as they often felt quite random, and not useful to the story’s pacing or plotting. However, the deeper I waded into the narrative, the more I appreciated Peu’s stylistic risk-taking and her attempt to innovate within the context of such a polyphonic novel. My interpretation of Peu’s structure is highly tied to my own perspective as an Indian American novelist. Given that Peu comes from a culture which prides itself on collective thinking, she wanted to write a novel that was centered not on one particular individual struggle but on one family’s struggle to live freely and unabashedly, despite the poverty that has limited their intellectual and economic ability to expand. Being a writer in the French language at the same time, Peu most likely wanted to expand the limitations of her canon, not only by being a female writer from French Polynesia but also by creating a style that was exclusively hers. This makes the novel feel more like a narrative patchwork centered around the concept of French Polynesia rather than a story focused on one individual life. The idea of Pina, or Pina’s family, rather, often feels more like a framing tactic within which Peu can explore and uproot the history and culture of an entire island and its problems—rather than an exploration of a single character’s perspective.
While Peu’s novel encompasses a wide plethora of subjects, it is the insurmountability of poverty, as well as the decision to love a troubled man no matter how much it runs everyone else’s future into the ground, that provide the book’s thematic anchors and help move it along. In this sense, Pina’s voice is subsumed, because ultimately this is not a story about a child’s suffering but one about the people who never learned how to properly pass on love. From the beginning, Pina’s mother, Tera Vahine, finds herself so desperate to have a boy that she inhales potions to make it happen, only for her to ultimately give birth to Pina.
The lights there were so white they hurt her eyes. All around was commotion and glares and got-no-time-for-you-now. Ma sat there three long hours, not saying a word. A little one-year-old girl was crying bloody murder while her mother with bloodshot eyes and a face too young to be a mother’s was pleading for anything, anyone . . . for them not to be let down.
In many ways, here Peu is describing the horrors of parenthood that are familiar and relatable to anyone who is new to it. But in the context of her novel, Peu is also giving voice to a thought that has found little space in literature: a mother who objectively hates her own daughter. Tera Vahine’s entire mothering style is built on neglect, to the point that years pass before Ma realizes that her daughter is now a young child. This is not the romantic exclamation that parents will say to their friends: “My child has grown up so quickly! How time flies.” Rather, Vahine “[lights a] cigarette” and notices her daughter “walk over. It hit her like a bolt of lightning . . . Ma was shocked to find herself wondering who this weak little girl was, hardly pretty but nice enough. It was as if her girl had grown up overnight and what was now standing there, right beside her, was a stranger.”
The novel also tends to adopt the perspective of Pauro and his lover François as an attempt to shed light on how homosexuality is perceived in French Polynesia. While François has all of the freedom and liberties bestowed on a French man, Pauro is the subject of constant slurs and threats, both by family members and strangers, for being gay. As someone who identifies as gay myself, I appreciated Peu’s desire to speak for LGBTQ+ people in her community, but I also found of elements of Pauro’s experience cliché, fitting a lot of the tropes expected from LGBTQ+ characters. For instance, while Pauro eventually finds his strength at the end of the book—which manifests itself in a unique way—he spends most of the novel hating himself, being passive in the face of homophobic slurs or acts of violence, and wishing to be something he is not. While I’m sure such people exist in French Polynesia, as they do in any other corner of the world, I would have liked to see Peu explore Pauro with a lot more depth, to have her character be something more than a tortured gay man who suddenly saves the day when the plot demands it.
Nonetheless, there is more to appreciate than to criticize in Peu’s efforts, particularly given the wide canvas that she paints with her story and her characters in the first place. Peu’s novel won both the 2017 Eugène Dabit Prize as well as the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize, and it is plain to see why. Much like Balzac or Hugo from two centuries past, Peu has written a novel of great social intent, with a desire to delve into the problems of modern French Polynesia and give them a space in the canon of French literature. Whether her attempts at innovation will be prized in the way we revere Flaubert or Proust is hard to tell at this point in time; but Peu’s novel makes for riveting reading, with a plot centered on violence and intolerance of the Other, and a sense of momentum that propels the reader along until the very end.
Much like a constellation of islands, the compilation of characters which Peu has imagined are vibrant and diverse. A postmodern and polyphonic take on the coming-of-age novel, Pina makes for great reading for fans of Catcher in the Rye or Jane Eyre looking for more nuanced female perspectives, an inquisitive exploration of sexuality in a marginalized part of the world, and an astute awareness of how geographical and class differences fit into the larger tableau of global exploitation and oppression.
