Of books and breadfruit - a novelists childhood in Tahiti

By MARGIE THOMSON

Come and talk to my new boyfriend - he's beautiful but I can't speak to him," Celestine Vaite's friend, who could not speak English, begged Vaite, who could.

The boyfriend was an Australian surfie visiting Tahiti, and 16-year-old Vaite agreed that he was a spunk. "Still is! Still is!" she cries, nearly 18 years later.

She married him, had a couple of babies, moved to Australia with him, had a couple more babies, felt homesick for the islands and people she had left behind, wrote a charming, funny novel about them ...

"Which just goes to show you never know what lies ahead when you're 16 and your mama is telling you there are plenty of local boys for you to choose among."

It was books that brought Vaite and Michael together. She had a list of attributes for any prospective husband: must be a reader, must not drink, must love children, must be handsome. Michael was the one, and the sign by which Vaite knew for sure was that, like her, he had read Guy de Maupassant's A Woman's Life, and his house was the first one she had seen that had lots of books in it.

Vaite's novel, Breadfruit (Vintage, $24.95), is based on her own growing up on Faaa, where her mother, a single parent, inherited land and a fibro house behind a petrol station, just like the main character, Matarena, in Vaite's story.

Like Matarena's mother, Loana, Vaite's mother, Hitiura, would climb the breadfruit tree when times were tough, which they often were, for something to barbecue, bake or fry along with the ubiquitous, cheap, tinned, corned beef.

Matarena has been with Pito, the father of her three children, since she was 16. She privately craves a ring on her finger and a wedding certificate on the wall, but Pito seems more committed to his mates and his drinking than to the woman who shares his bed.

But one night he proposes. "Marry me, he slurs now, red-eyed, swaying on his feet ... Are you going to marry me or what? ... " Five minutes later, Pito is unconscious and snoring.

Matarena begins fantasising and planning, even though the next time Pito mentions marriage it is to describe it as the rope around the neck. Matarena's plans, her investigation and costing of all the elements for her imaginary wedding are part of what drives Vaite's narrative forward, but interspersed with this funny yet tense storyline are many incidental cousins, each with a story to tell. Cousin Rita's sexy, loving escapades with Coco; Matarena's mother, Loana, and mother-in-law, Mama Roti; sexy Lily ... The characters - insular, gossipy, meddling - are impossible to tire of or dislike.

Such is this first-time novelist's skill that she weaves serious issues - land alienation, French justice, abandonment of Tahitian women by French soldiers, economic struggle - so seamlessly into the narrative that one hardly realises one is being shown something political.

At Vaite's first school, the Sainte Therese Catholic School, Sister Bernadette the librarian became her best friend and encouraged the young girl to send her poems to the Journal of Tahiti for publication. (Vaite later found out that her mother had never posted the poems.)

There was only one book in Vaite's mother's house, and that was the Bible.

"Before you read those inventing books you should read the Bible," her mother told her. And later: "You better meet a man who reads!"

When she was 12, Vaite won a scholarship to the College Anne Marie Javouhey in Papeete. At 15, she came to New Zealand as an exchange student, to James Cook High School, where the Maori students called her cousin.

Her relationship with Michael began the year after, in 1983, and defied all predictions. According to her mother, foreigners always went back to their own country, leaving their Tahitian girlfriends behind.

And, indeed, Michael did return to Australia, but he sent Vaite a ticket, she visited him, and three weeks later they were married in the small town of Bowral, Vaite changing into her wedding clothes in the public toilet. It is still talked about today, how Hitiura's eldest daughter went off and got married without her mother's permission.

Vaite and Michael live by the beach at Ulladulla on the south coast of New South Wales. Michael runs a graphic design business. Vaite raises their four children, makes cakes, and walks on the beach with her eyes shut, singing Tahitian songs and thinking of home.

Once she began writing Breadfruit Vaite became desperate to finish it while her mother was still living. Her mother is indeed still alive, and proud of her daughter's accomplishment, and of the dedication to "my mother ... who taught me that love is the greatest motive of all."

She was the first person to get a copy, Vaite says. "These things daughters do for their mothers. I am paying her back for all the houses she's cleaned."