By Selma Carvalho
Rightly, Paul Gauguin is classed as a post-impressionist, but of course he painted during the glory days of impressionism. Already then, his art showed a marked departure from his contemporaries, resisting the lure of Parisienne plein air, he set sail for Papeete, leaving behind a wife, five children, and a pregnant mistress; there he embraced the liberating boldness of colour and broader brush stroke for which he is known today. What would, in retrospect, become problematic was his content, the lives and production of “the other” that he consumed both sexually and, in his art.
At the heart of the controversy lies Teha’amana, his muse, barely thirteen (or was she eleven) when forty-three-year-old Gauguin, by arrangement with her Foster Mother, took her as his ‘bride.’ Could Teha’amana give her consent in such an arrangement? And if we assume some diluted and distorted form of consent, did she have any agency in this action? Does Teha’amana have a voice at all or was she robbed of her voice and deserves to have it restored to her? That is what Devika Ponnambalam sets out to do in her beautiful book, I Am Not Your Eve (Bluemoose, 2022). Almost immediately, the exquisite beauty of Ponnambalam’s writing and form has echoes of Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape, 2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker, which fictionalised poet John Clare with extraordinary lyricism. It wouldn’t be at all presumptuous to suggest Ponnambalam’s rendering of Teha’amana is similarly headed for awards.
In many ways, I Am Not Your Eve, is not just Teha’amana’s manifesto, a cri de coeur against relinquishing her body boundaries, but the women orbiting Gauguin’s life, his wife Mette-Sophie Gad, and particularly his oldest daughter Aline, whose perspective comes to us in the form of diary entries, such as these: “Papa is gone, living his life, the one he has chosen, and we have all been left behind.” The women know of each other through his paintings, those he sends back to Paris, and those he has in his hut in Tahiti. Aline anguishes, “unable to sleep, I decided to go up to the attic where Maman has banished Manao Tupapau [Gauguin’s iconic painting titled ‘Spirit of the Dead Watching’] …Papa’s private world, a little piece of Tahiti…” And Teha’amana wonders about the “woman who looks as though happiness left her a long time ago? The woman you keep hidden in your wooden box, leaving the key for me to find…” Both imagine the “otherness” of bodies, cultures, desires. The women are mere actors around Gauguin, mere limbs, extensions of his artistic endeavours, they are muses, models, they are conduits to galleries in Europe, they can at times be painted interchangeably, they are for all purposes inanimate.
A cursory acquaintanceship with Gauguin’s art does help in better appreciating this book, his rejection of the colonial project which sought to enculturate the ‘native’, his quest for the pure and unadulterated indigene, which, however one couched it, was little more than the colonial explorer’s quest for the ‘noble savage’, who he inevitably infantilised and undoubtedly traumatised. Indeed, a figure as complex and prodigiously gifted as Gauguin cannot be completely invisibilised or reduced to a twenty-first century gaze, and so he makes cameo appearances, with this aside for instance: “I was alone, and lonely, completely wretched…Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” What we know of Gauguin is that he is an unreliable witness, fictionalising his accounts or even plagiarising them. Gauguin’s culpability is tellingly revealed when confronted by Aline’s desire to join the adult world: “when the leaves come out, will I be big? [ she asks] Papa said it would take longer, that the leaves may have to come out at least ten times.” With this subtle juxtaposition, Ponnambalam holds Gauguin to account, he is aware of Aline’s long road ahead to womanhood, that maturity takes time, time which he rapaciously steals from Teha’amana.
How does one give voice to Teha’amana when she exists in depiction and expression solely through Gauguin’s imagination of her? Ponnambalam does an exceptional job combining archival and field research. It’s a delicate affair respecting the particularity of indigenous culture while simultaneously unravelling the trauma of sex, where consent is muddied.
“You are not so old, but not very handsome, your teeth stained yellow, but I hope you will be kind, because you are a white man.” Thus begins Teha’amana’s story. It was common practice on the Polynesian islands for French colonists to take young indigenous women (vahine) as wives, a transactional exchange which suited both the men and the families. “How did she manage to catch a white man,” Teha’amana acknowledges her position may well be one of envy in the village. But Teha’amana’s lack of agency in everything that happens to her, comes to us repeatedly, in heart-breaking lines such as these: “He makes me lie naked…sometimes he gets angry, and tells me to settle down, like I am a dog…”
There is every possibility that Teha’amana is a composite character or at any rate fictionalised in part in Gauguin’s journal Noa Noa. Ponnambalam addresses this: “Some say I am not real. And I never breathed, lived, or cried. I am bits of your imagination, pieces of all the vahines that came to you.” What isn’t in dispute is that Gauguin took vahines during his time in Tahiti, that he had a fondness for pubescent girls, and that he equated sex to mere function. Teha’amana’s voice, then, becomes the voice of struggle and resistance against male colonial privilege, and is as relevant as ever in interrogating our past. Ponnambalam’s book is a timely read, and will undoubtedly contribute to pressing conservations about separating art from the artist, and ownership of production.
Read also Souza: The Artist, His Loves & His Times
Selma Carvalho is editor at JRLJ.
I Am Not Your Eve, 183pp, hardbound, is available for purchase here or in UK bookstores.