It took Louise Michel four months to get to New Caledonia, in a cage below the deck of a French frigate. It took me just 27 hours by air, but it still felt like arriving on a different planet. One thousand miles east of Brisbane, the archipelago is about as far as you can physically get from France. That’s why thousands of leftwing political prisoners were sent to the colony in 1871 following the defeat of the Paris Commune, the short-lived takeover of Paris by radical workers.
The aim of the deportation regime was to implicate the defeated rebels in the colonisation project. By “civilising” the Kanaks – the indigenous Melanesian people – the convicts would, in the process, be forced to “civilise” themselves. Loneliness, boredom and distance would turn them, if they survived the sunstroke and disease, into obedient citizens of a state they had tried to overthrow.
Michel had other ideas. She refused to stand by as the Kanaks were murdered with impunity, their culture obliterated. When they staged their own revolt in 1878, Michel was one of a tiny number of white people to support them. She claimed to have given two Kanak warriors her red scarf – the official regalia of the Paris Commune, which she had managed to hide. “They slipped into the ocean,” she wrote in her memoir. “The sea was bad and they may never have arrived across the bay, or perhaps they were killed in the fighting … but they were brave, in a way both black and white people love.”
If the story is true, its symbolism is immense. In the 1970s, when young Kanaks began their modern struggle for independence, some called themselves Les Foulards Rouges (the Red Scarves) in direct reference to Michel’s story. But is Michel a reliable witness? Today, she is something of a secular saint in France: a square in Paris and numerous schools are named after her. However, as with Joan of Arc, to whom she is frequently compared, nobody seems to care whether or not everything she claims to have seen was real. I have to care, though. I’m finishing a play inspired by her experience here. It’s about the women whose lives were transformed by the revolt in Paris – and what you do when the revolution dies but the liberated self does not.
Michel arrived in 1873, one of 4,000 political prisoners sent to New Caledonia for life. Nine hundred were placed in isolation on the Ducos Peninsula, just 16 of them women. Ducos was cut off from the main island by mangrove swamps, so the deportees were allowed to wander freely, build shacks, quarrel and write letters home.
Today Ducos is a warren of tracks, boatyards and migrant shantytowns, its hillsides teeming with bananas, ferns and creepers, and wrapped in a brown haze from a nickel plant. It was here that, within 18 months of her arrival, Michel collected and published in a local paper translations of 14 Kanak folktales. In some cases, the source is acknowledged – a Kanak servant who lived among the deportees. At other times, Michel writes as if she has seen the Kanak rituals first-hand: “The storyteller, half-asleep, half-awake, tells while dreaming stories that we listen to while dreaming.”
Modern scholars tend to dismiss Michel’s amateur ethnography. But at the time, Michel’s publication of the Kanak legends – even if she westernised and embellished them – was a revolutionary act. She studied the Kanaks as if they were agents of their own destiny, just as the Parisian working class had been. She understood the catastrophic impact of land seizures on them. Still, the question remains: could she have realistically met Kanaks on their way to join an uprising that never got within 50km of her location?
Max Shekleton, a former British consul whose great-grandfather knew Michel, dismisses the idea. “It’s impossible for her to have met Kanak rebels in 1878,” he says, “and if she had, they would have probably killed her.” He shows me a 19th-century map indicating the spot where Michel built her hut. Armed with a copy, I set off for a narrow isthmus at the tip of the peninsula known as the Baie des Dames.
The women marooned here were mainly working class: seamstresses, laundry staff, and at least one former sex worker. They had been removed from the most civilised city in the world and taken to a remote beach on a far-flung island. We turn the corner into the bay, and the scenery lives up to Michel’s prose. It’s a spectacular natural amphitheatre: two hills linked by a strip of land with beach on either side.
In the spot where Michel is supposed to have given away her scarf, and where my play is set, there is now a petroleum depot. You can see – exactly where Shekleton’s map indicates – levelled terraces and ornamental trees where the women’s huts were. I get out my camera and a security guy arrives to quiz my researcher and me. When I mention Michel, he says: “Her ideas were unsound, so she had to be separated from the rest.” After a while, he goes away, and I sit amid the fly-tipped rubbish, measuring the red scarf story against the real landscape.
It is immediately clear that, contrary to academic assumptions, Michel’s story is plausible. It’s about 700 metres from this beach to the next small island and, according to my GPS, about a kilometre from there to the mainland. A strong swimmer could make it in two hours. Accounts of the Kanak rising show that, although the main revolt did stop 50km north of here, white colonists slaughtered a clan of suspected rebels on the shore opposite this very beach, where the “red scarf” warriors could have landed.
Five of those interned alongside Michel belonged to the so-called “women’s battalion” of the Commune – an ad hoc group who fought on a barricade opposite what is now the Moulin Rouge. Their names and faces now forgotten, they were, in their time, the most feared feminists on Earth. In the play, Michel and the women prisoners have to gasp for air as the tide of history turns against them. They face loneliness, boredom and futility on a scale I only properly understand now that I’m here, with just the crabs scuttling through the mud and the mosquitoes buzzing.
There’s a reason Michel’s memoirs are so easily dismissed as fantasy: their fragmentary style. One moment she is on the ramparts of Paris, reading Baudelaire by the light of tracer shells. The next she is on Ducos, observing the termites, or listing the different Kanak words for the niaouli tree. At times, she calls on the island itself as a witness to injustice: “On dark nights the niaoulis give off a phosphorescence, and in the light of the full moon their branches rise up weeping like the arms of giants crying over the enslavement of the Earth.”
But such storytelling holds no mystery for anyone who’s interviewed modern combat veterans. And the longer I’m on the island, the more I trust Michel, despite the scant detail she discloses about her connections with the Kanak rebels. For, even today, New Caledonia is the land of the non-dit, the unsayable.
After the modern Kanak rising of 1984-88, in which scores were killed, the French bought peace with economic largesse. The apartheid system is gone – you will see middle-class Kanaks eating in restaurants alongside the descendants of white settlers. But the discontent is not. As we tour the island, there is tension: the township of St Louis, just outside the capital, Noumea, has become a partial no-go area, with sporadic carjackings and alleged hostage-taking by the indigenous population.
We drive north to heartland of the 1878 rising. At Fort Teremba, beseiged by the Kanaks in 1878, we visit 10 solitary confinement cells, cleverly designed so that the inmate can never see the sky. What strikes me is the emptiness of the surrounding countryside: after 1878, the French cleared the Kanaks off the land to reservations.
Yvan Kona, an oral historian at the Kanak cultural institute, tells me that even now he cannot easily get on to white-owned land to do his work. If the 1878 revolt was an uneven battle, he says, so is the battle for historical memory: “Our tradition is oral – telling stories and listening. The official history is the one written down by the victors. All we can do is collect the folk memories of the vanquished.”
And that is what justifies Michel’s attempt to record the Kanak stories. I leave New Caledonia determined to write something true to her memoirs, if not to the rules of modern anthropology. Hers was a white colonial gaze, even if through the bars of a prison cell. And her observations are clouded by poetry, fantasy, evasion, trauma and Eurocentric theories. But she understood something that later French colonial anthropologists did not: that human rights are universal.
“The Kanaks were seeking the same liberty we had sought in the Commune,” she wrote. Michel undertood that, like the Commune, the Kanak revolt of 1878 had to happen, even if it was doomed to failure. And she chose that moment to transfer her most precious physical possession – the red scarf of the Commune – to a people derided as subhuman.
• Divine Chaos of Starry Things is at the White Bear theatre, London, until 20 May.
