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Embodied Precarity in Chantal T. Spitz’s Short Stories

Like her first collection of short stories, Cartes postales (2015), Chantal T. Spitz’s most recent collection, Et la mer pour demeure (2022) highlights the precarity of living in Mā’ohi Nui (otherwise known as French occupied Polynesia). While Cartes postales specifically focuses on women’s lives with stories often named after their female protagonists focusing on the various challenges that women face in the archipelago (domestic violence, poverty, depression, capitalist expansion), Et la mer pour demeure draws attention to the general precarity of living in a colonized, exoticized country. This article discusses the women Spitz chooses to feature in the short vignettes that have become her most prominent form of storytelling in the past decade. These women living vulnerable lives in Mā’ohi Nui reveal the sociocultural, economic, neocolonial, and political factors that exacerbate precarity in the archipelago. What role does recounting the stories of female precarity play in the denunciation of exoticizing myths about Mā’ohi Nui? What kind of woman is depicted as vulnerable, and who among them is painted as part of a larger structural problem? Who are the women who demonstrate resilience in the face of vulnerability, and what might the woman who succumbs to a precarious situation reveal about the challenges the country faces in the twenty-first century?