Julia Frengs and Katherine Hammitt
Denis Pourawa is a Kanak (Indigenous) writer born in 1974 in Nouméa, the capital city of Kanaky/New Caledonia, a French-speaking archipelago situated close to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. In 2003, he wrote his first children’s book; since, he has published (and performed) in a variety of literary genres, including poetry, theatre, short essays, and slam poetry. A member of the Mérénémé tribe, Pourawa’s work is influenced by his childhood memories, Kanak tradition, and his first encounter with “occidental thinking” through literature, which encouraged him to dedicate his life to the arts.
Pourawa’s writing, and particularly his poetry, is distinctive for its deeply philosophical engagement both with Kanak thinking and with what many in the Caribbean scholarly community and those familiar with the work of Édouard Glissant have called “archipelagic thinking.” As Glissant states in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Archipelago, “I think the idea of the archipelago – as a place where we can begin to understand and resolve the contradictions of the world – should be propagated” (19). Indeed, Pourawa cites Glissant, and several other Caribbean archipelagic thinkers, in the translated excerpts we provide here of the 2023 poetry collection Ton âme corail. Rather than archipelagic thinking, however, Pourawa views his writing as “coral thinking.” In answer to a question we asked Pourawa regarding the choice of title Ton âme corail (namely, why the informal “ton” and to whom this “ton” refers) the author elucidated not only the title of the collection but also his choice of intertextual references throughout the work:
The collection of poetry with the title “Ton âme corail” is a form of poetic and political theory on the nature of the human soul. Like polyps that form to become coral, then make themselves into a coral reef, the human soul coming from the end of the ages takes the Oceanian Melanesian Kanak metaphor of being born at the bottom of the ocean in the “land of the dead” […] Soul born at the bottom of the abyss, soul become algae, then coral that lifts itself up, pushing like a plant using its own potential, strength and life energy attracted toward the surface of the waters by the light of the sun. It’s this reference to the natural elevation of life, from the bottom of the abyss toward the light, to everything that makes the soul of human nature and of humanity. The informal “you” or the “your” is that of Humanity. Here the “you” is used in the vernacular Kanak meaning of the duo, guè mè gû (you and me) what is “you” is also “me.” (“Re: Quelques questions”)[1]
This last line, wherein Pourawa explains the meaning of the informal “you,” has inspired us to translate the title of the collection as Our Coral Soul, precisely to capture the collective nature of the Kanak meaning of the duo, “guè mè gû,” (you and me), a decision Pourawa approved in a follow-up as aptly conveying this sense of the collective. Throughout the collection, therefore, we have chosen to translate all instances of “ton” with the plural “our.” Thus, every poem included here linguistically enters into “Relation,” from the Kanak language Xârâcùù translated into the French, and the French into the English.
Like Glissant articulates throughout his work, Pourawa sees human existence, and the human soul, as perpetually situated in “relation” to others, intricately tied to the natural processes one might observe of coral. As Glissant remarks, “Archipelagos are able to diffract, they create diversity and expansiveness, they are spaces of relation that recognize all the infinite details of the real. Being in harmony with the world through archipelagos means inhabiting this diffraction, while still rallying coastlines and joining horizons. They open us to a sea of wandering…” (Archipelago 20–21).
In the following poetic prose that opens Ton âme corail/Our Coral Soul, Pourawa situates himself as a poet becoming the profoundly entangled world he describes. The life he brings emerges from the depths in a genealogy that extends beyond the human to encompass all life interconnected in the space of a coral reef. This coral creoleness connects Glissantian Relation to a Kanak cosmology in which the self is never singular but always understood “en référence à,” according to Kanak political leader and theorist Jean-Marie Tjibaou. As Julia Frengs points out in an article on Pourawa’s collection, Tjibaou, president of the Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front in the 1970s and 80s, was focused on expanding inter-island relationships. Frengs remarks: “Like Glissant, Tjibaou’s political stance was that every person exists in relation to the other, especially within the Kanak community” (Frengs 12). Bringing these two archipelagic thinkers together in this collection enables Pourawa to unite his poetry, a poetry rooted in Kanak epistemology, to other Oceanic areas of the world, creating a poetic One World Ocean.[2]
Translating this section presents several opportunities to trace the philosophical roots of Pourawa’s thought as well as symbols and metaphors tied closely to an Oceanian experience: what Pourawa calls an “interior oceanic view of the world” (Pourawa, Ton âme 12). We explore, for instance, the significance of parole/Word, the specific nonhuman entities that share the poet’s “clairvoyant-spirit” (11), and a temporality that collapses a teleological human existence into his poesis of visionary cycles: “Vision is immortal birth” (12). “Space-time” represents an intersection of being, at once situated and encompassing (12). This coral existence, the “ton” that interpellates the reader into a relational “our,” brings us to “live our emotions in the same temporality” as we explore the unbounded possibilities of the “Word of the world” (14).
Introduction
This language, speech, story, call, narration that makes one dream, hope, battle, struggle, sing, here is writing’s powerful dream, to discuss the poetic energy that carries the momentum of the poet’s volcanic heart, the silt of the depths, this magnetic silt of the future’s origins, humanity crystalized in the formation of abyssal coral, memory of innumerable time.
In writing I take on the appearance of my words, the multiple memories buried in the story of my future, my meta-secular genealogies that spread the legible material of my clairvoyant-spirit through me, sometimes jellyfish, eagle, earthworm, larvae from the depths, star, comet, planet, molecule or algae gathering photosynthesis like a lizard perched on a rock soaking up the sun, I write in my inexhaustible and untamable future. In writing, my writing has invented for itself a coral reef.
A coral reef?
Yes, a sort of virgin strip of land, which is not a barrier of coral, but where fish abound.
All well-born islanders know the coral reef, this big submarine lung formed by polyps where all fishermen can stand and glimpse a vision in the light of day. Reading life from the bottom of the abyss, unadorned, feeling oneself coral, rooted and receptacle of invisible songs of the Oceans of the world, as an islander poet having an interior vision different from the attitude of metamorphosis or of chameleon. Here it’s the art of the coral that is of concern.
My poems were born of clairvoyant vision, without metamorphosis or poetic chameleonism. Here it is a question of the view of my futuristic vision, that of my islander nature, my intracellular vision born of an all-living Word[3] through all the oral currents circulated by the natural elements, water, wind, or even a cyclone.
Vision is immortal birth. Which is to say, to see life and to hear it as early as from one’s mother’s belly and to be born from the belly of that life to return through it one day. The cycle of poetic clairvoyance retraces the saga of our humanity. The transformation of the human being is but the repetitive schema of this vision and its own clairvoyance, its own projection into space-time.
I say: “my vision precedes me, it is my future and my daily birth.” As a poet I write poetry that procures for me the necessary resources to nourish my poetic vision. The work of a living coral that pushes through the bottom of abysses, sees the sunlight and drinks it in so that the earth continues to breathe. Poetry brings me an interior oceanic view of the world, so I compose ideological coral reefs at the whim of my readings, writings, and encounters, or the hopes of the ocean depths of which total knowledge is grasped through a persistent study of clairvoyance. Sometimes there is a fear of discovering a marine monster buried in the subconscious. Poetry is the tool that permits one to confront all one’s own interior demons.
Poetry is a tool of freedom of social clairvoyance and of the revolutionary soul of a joie de vivre.
[….]
A vision sprouts very slowly at the speed of a living coral, it is sensitive to all the cosmic flows of thought, of writing and of the Word of the world.
This visionary coral grows in the depths of the Oceanic emotions of our humanity and in the depths of oblivion, it captures the light of time to free itself. Islander universal silt, brute material and real spirit of the great feelings and great hopes that inhabit us, from wherever we may be. Of all the lands, we live our emotions in the same temporality, that which starts with the sunrise and ends with the sunset.
The poet Édouard Glissant said that we should “inhabit errantry.” Jean-Marie Tjibaou said: “a return toward the past is a myth…our identity is in front of us.”
Our coral soul proposes an “islander emotion” to reconcile, to rebuild from a love that I will call Topical.[4]
The poems we have translated below embrace the concept of Relation in an Oceanian (Pacific) context, yet they expressly invite the “Oceans of the world” to participate in this coral interdependence, or symbiosis, or what Pourawa will later call “Creolinesia,” a neologism that brings together the archipelagos of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. The title of the first poem, “All our ocean soul” (in the original “Toute ton âme océanique”) connotes a collective ocean “soul,” a shared, flowing, liquid collective experience, in the singular to maintain the “Our” of the Kanak “guè mè gû.”
All our ocean soul
It’s all in place
And slips smoothly in stanzas from the dead woods
[that always dare to speak
The psalms that pour out of kindred
[mouths
The acoustic binding of a crack in the island
[on the banks of the diversified
The red-light crossing from the sacred
To the blood of the broken beach the clear
[enduring moon
The cry of inks emerges
By tracing deep drifting lines
Shadow of worn words
And punctuation in seasonal intoxication
Oh what innocent impulse
The art of strolling
The poem’s archipelago
Every horizon soul, soul of boundless love,
every illuminated soul
Our breeze line,
our soul battered by timeless coastlines,
our trembling wake sliding with emotion between
Oceans
The next poem, left untitled and italicized throughout in the original, calls together Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Indeed, the souls of the poetry of these archipelagos “sparkle” from the “same trunk.” The short text is rife with ecological imagery, from the “coral soul” to the “windy Atlantic,” to the “yam sprout,” a reference to the most important, symbolic food staple for the Kanak people. The yam is not only a source of food; it is sacred and represents both power and honor in Kanak culture. It also determines the Kanak calendar and the rhythm of the year. The harvest, generally in April, begins the Kanak year, and is marked by the “Fête de l’igname,” wherein the Kanak people enter into communion with their ancestors.
Our coral soul, peppery Africa, salt Caribbean,
windy Atlantic, everything melts together in the solar trade
wind,
our soul that dances from the same trunk sparkles
in the beats of a Creole emotion
Our island poetry, the one that comes from the uproar of
the sudden work, our yam sprout Word of
eternal vitality
The following poem’s title is of particular interest, as the term “Oceanitude” was coined by Ni-Vanuatu writer Paul Tavo in his 2015 novel Quand le cannibal ricane. In her 2024 monograph The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists, Anaïs Maurer explores the genesis, development, and genealogy of Oceanitude. According to Maurer, Oceanitude is simultaneously a decolonial ideology, an identity, and a political, economic, and environmental movement “centered on the lineage and the relationship uniting people and the places that sustain them” (Maurer 56) through the concept of “living together.” She explains that “the ocean and its people are not metaphorically but rather consubstantially, genealogically, and historically related” (63). While Pourawa does not refer to Oceanitude within the poem itself, the title along with the imagery of a needle “crossing through the world’s fragility, pulling space together by piercing the wandering presences from the silent landscapes” demonstrate his concept of an inherent Oceanic consubstantiality of body and earth, a relationality envisioned through poetic voice.
Oceanid soul oceanitude coral there
In the belly[5] of the wind come from the
far off land
A brilliant mind of the lands
gives of its voice
Awakened voice
From out of the memory of Xû[6]
Crossing as a needle through
and through time
The world’s fragility
Pulling space together by
piercing the wandering presences
from the silent landscapes
Untangling the regions’ joy
from the fear that makes myth
In the eyes of each stone
that is petrified
In the heart cut off from its
vegetal roots
When everything around
is covered in
darkness
Then the
song of an
intangible
flower
Then the sound
of its
beating
Then the
poem
Sweeter
More exhilarating
In the final poem to be excerpted here, Pourawa expands his reference to Glissantian/Tjibaou relationality to engage with créolité/creoleness more explicitly. While Creolistes Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant asserted the relational, hybrid experience of Caribbean identity in their 1989 manifesto Éloge de la créolité, here Pourawa explores the unbounded nature of a One World Ocean: Relational, Topical, and “teem[ing].” The transoceanic solidarity that characterizes Pourawa’s coral cosmology unbinds creoleness from a limited, Caribbean-specific understanding. The poem’s imagery embraces movement and freedom, with “arms of wandering fire,” “carefree rivers,” and the “sparkle” of “diverse shapes.”
Clandestine of all creoleness
This world
you don’t hear it
how it teems
from within
how it sparkles
with its most diverse shapes
How that sets off
the rhythms that don’t have music
How its moon
throws arms of a wandering fire
under the rippling skirts of carefree rivers
[and everything rolls
on light fluttering shadows where
[the sacred itself
arrives in solitude
slipping by its graceful tresses
Conclusion
As the space for our intervention is limited, we have regrettably had to exclude several poems that, although omitted here, contribute to the collection’s engagement with Relational thinking and to its dialogue with various archipelagic thinkers of the French-speaking world. In one such example, the first poem of the collection, “Coral” engages with the notion of the Coolie. A slang term for Indian indentured laborers used to replace enslaved people after abolition in the Caribbean and Indian oceans, “Coolie” has been reappropriated by Mauritian writer, filmmaker, and cultural theorist Khal Torabully as “Coolitude.” In Chair Corail, fragments Coolie (Coral Flesh, Coolie Fragments, 1999), Torabully envisions the figure of the Coolie with “coral flesh,” using an imagery which he argues is a perfect metaphor for diversity – it is adaptable, migratory, constantly in movement, extensive, and lives in symbiosis with other organisms. Like Torabully, Pourawa’s poetry envisions a spiritual, ontological symbiotic relationship between bodies and coral.
Pourawa’s dialogue with other Oceanic thinkers is one of the more compelling reasons motivating our translation. The collection enters into conversation with francophone islander writers and thinkers: in our minds, it functions as literary theory alongside Glissant, the Créolistes, or Kamau Braithewaite’s “tidalectics,” and it intersects with the work of blue humanities scholars Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Stacy Alaimo, and Sid Dobrin. Furthermore, this collection resonates not only with other oceanic regions, but also with writers, thinkers, and artists from the anglophone Pacific from whom francophone scholars continue to be linguistically separated due to a historic lack of translation from French to English. Kanaka Māoli (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandi Nālani McDougall’s poem “Last Coral Standing,” like Pourawa’s collection, envisions the coral as ancestor, as part of an Oceanian soul:
We know coral polyps, living
in their perforated skeletal branches,
are our eldest kupuna—What family
do we lose when the turning heat
reclaims them? What salt water
will rise in us, in that moment,
expelling blood from bone? (Āina Hānau / Birth Land 88)
Our hope is that our translation facilitates the inter-Oceanic dialogue at the heart of Denis Pourawa’s collection, creating a linguistic coral reef across the Ocean of voices engaged in archipelagic thinking.
Denis Pourawa. Ton âme corail. Editions de l’Aigrette, 2023.
Julia Frengs is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on representations of the body, Indigenous epistemologies, and environmental engagement in Indian and Pacific Ocean literatures. Her published work on Pourawa appears in the November 2025 issue of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics and the 2025 volume Littérature et politique en Océanie, published by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme du Pacifique.
Katherine Hammitt is a postdoctoral Dornsife Fellow in General Education at the University of Southern California. Her translations have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review and in the 2020 edited volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory published by Liverpool University Press. Her research focuses on frameworks of relationality in francophone and anglophone literature from Oceania.
Works Cited
Frengs, Julia. “Coral Souls: Think-feeling with the Ocean in Denis Pourawa’s Ton âme corail.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 48. No. 3, Autumn 2025, pp. 7–20.
Glissant, Édouard, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Archipelago. Trans. Emma Ramadan. isolarii, 2021.
Keown, Michelle. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford UP, 2007.
Maurer, Anaïs. The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists. Duke UP, 2024.
McDougall, Brandi Nālani. Āina Hānau / Birth Land. University of Arizona Press, 2023.
Moyse-Faurie, Claire. “Existential and locative predication in some eastern Oceanic languages.” Te Reo: Journal of the New Zealand Society, Special Issue in Honour of Frantisek Lichtenberk, 62 (1), 2019, pp. 49–74.
Pourawa, Denis. Ton âme corail. Éditions de l’Aigrette, 2023.
—. “Re: Quelques questions pour la traduction.” Personal correspondence. May 21, 2025.
Spitz, Chantal. Island of Shattered Dreams, Translated by Jean Anderson, Huia, 2007.
Tjibaou, Jean-Marie. La Présence kanak. Alban Bensa and Wric Wittersheim, eds. Paris: Édition Odile Jacob, 1996.
[1] Translated from the original correspondence in French by the authors.
[2] The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asserts that there is only one global ocean, which they call One World Ocean: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/howmanyoceans.html.
[3] We capitalize “Word” here to emphasize the significance of Pourawa’s use of the term “parole,” a concept that references the centrality of oral tradition to “spiritual, material, and social life,” in “both Kanak and Mā’ohi [indigenous to French Polynesia] cultures,” as Michelle Keown explains in Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania ( Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 149. See also Jean Anderson’s discussion of “mot” vs. “parole” in her “Translator’s Note” to Mā’ohi author Chantal T. Spitz’s novel L’île des rêves écrasés, her translation of which was published as Island of Shattered Dreams in 2007.
[4] Pourawa uses the word “Topique” in the original, in reference to “topoi,” or “common places,” a philosophy of Aristotle that refers not to physical spaces but to mental frameworks used for generating rhetorical and logical arguments. We have opted, thus, to translate the term as “Topical,” like Pourawa’s choice, to retain the Aristotelian meaning (the title Topics is from one of Aristotle’s six works on logic).
[5] The belly (not the heart) serves as the site of emotion in cultural expression across Oceania. It also serves as a physical site of connection between people and land through the tradition, also found across Oceanian communities, of burying a newborn’s placenta.
[6] In Xârâcùù, xû can function as either the preposition “on” or “on top of,” or it can mean “topic,” referring to the subject of a story (see Moyse-Faurie, Claire). Pourawa’s capitalization of the word refers both to storytelling and to “Topic,” as in the Aristotelian theory (see footnote 3).