Women Writers in New Caledonia

Defining New Caledonian literature poses a number of questions and, in particular, the question of where and when to begin. In his seminal anthology of this literature, Paroles et Ecritures, Francois Bogliolo includes the considerable corpus constituted by Kanak oral tradition. Women have played a significant role in the transmission of these oral stories, and a number of contemporary written texts have revisited this tradition, for example, the novel by Claudine Jacques, L’Homme-Lézard, which proposes a modern interpretation of the lizard myth, known throughout the many language groups of Grande Terre and transcribed by the ethnologist and pastor, Maurice Leenhardt under the title of Le Maître de Koné.