How should the Tales of Poindi be looked upon ?
As legends brought together, as a work of the imagination ?

      I was born in the bush, in a region where each colonist, as the first settler of the place, was obliged to clear his land and build his home. The Kouawa tribe were our neighbours.

     One day, a few months after my birth, there came to us, with a group of Kanakas and their popinées, a young popinée who was named Watchouma.

     Watchouma had already seen a few white men, but never a child, a white "pickaninny". When she saw me in my mother's arms, she was amazed an drew near to examine that pale baby curiously. She proposed to my mother that he be exchanged for her own, who was almost the same age - a custom frequent enough among Kanakas. As she did not understand my mother's refusal, she insisted until my mother to escape from the embarrassing situation without wounding her, told her that the gods of white men forbade such exchanges. Watchouma deemed that white gods had strange ideas, but as it was not proper to discuss the mandates of the gods, she submitted.
She submitted, but judjed that it would not offend the gods if she adopted me, though leaving me with my parents. From that day on I was her son, and she changed her name from Watchouma to that of Mandarine, which seemed more glorious and appropriate to her new state as mother of a white child.

     When, after the harvesting of the coffee, the other Kanakas returned to their tribe, Mandarine remained with her new son.

     Her life henceforth was divided between her tribe and the home of my parents. So I grew up listening to her stories, her tales, her imaginings, her explanation of the world. when she took me with her in the surrounding bush, Mandarine taught me to see with her eyes.

     What Mandarine told me and explained to me was therefore as natural and direct as anything my parents could teach me. It was simply a question of two separate worlds.

     I would never have dreamed of writing about such "ordinary" things if I had not left my country. That is how the Tales of Poindi grew.   

1938, Tales of Poindi. Legend of the South Pacific Islands,
trad. Esther Averill
Domino Press, New York

 to be continued ....

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