‘Why not a Woman!’: An Interview with Tahitian writer, Célstine Hitiura Vaite

Célestine Hitiura Viate is, to quote from her novel, Frangipani, a woman ‘who knows what she wants and makes it happen’ (83). Born in Tahiti, she moved to Australia with her surfer husband in her early twenties, and began writing when pregnant with her third child. Célestine has just completed the third novel of a Tahitian family saga that follows the life of Materena, a woman in part modelled on her own mother. In her ‘welcome to womanhood’ speech Materena counsels her daughter, Leilani: