First novelist Kanak and pioneer of the struggle for the independence of New Caledonia, the former government of the territory of the territory from 1999 to 2019 died at the age of 73.
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With the disappearance, on August 14, in Poindimié (New Caledonia), at the age of 73, from Déwé Gorodey, died the greatest female figure in Caledonian literature and politics. Jean-François Carenco, “as a minister in charge of overseas but also as a reader”, paid tribute to a “immense poet, avant-garde novelist, convinced activist, in love with her Caledonian land”.
Entry in 1999 into the first college government born from the Noumea agreement, Déwé Gorodey, which has been fighting cancer for several years, will have occupied it without discontinuing for twenty years, until 2019, the culture portfolio, citizenship and female condition. The institution welcomed “an international independence and renowned writer”, recalling the creation, during her mandates, of the Book House, of the Oceanian Book Fair, of the Kanak Academy of Languages, of the Society of authors, composers and publishers of New Caledonia, or the Citizenship Day.
Advocate of multiculturality, she worked “to the advent of Kanak and Oceanian culture as a base of common destiny for an independent and sovereign country”, put forward the Kanak Liberation Party (Palika), component of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS). Déwé Gorodey belonged to this Marxist inspiration branch of the Kanak independence coalition and had participated in its creation, in 1976.
Born on 1 er June 1949, in Ponérihouen, on the east coast of New Caledonia, this daughter of Pasteur leaves to study the letters in 1969 in Montpellier, where she is fully aware of her “colonized” condition. “At that time, there was a lot of agitation in universities. I started to listen to and to hear what students from other countries said and I realized that what their people lived was what ‘We lived, we kanak, “she said in an interview in 2010.
Reading the writers of Negritude, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damascus is grafted that of Marx, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg forging an ardent activist, who, back on his native land in 1973, Participate, with other students who are similarly chemin, at the “Kanak alarm clock”. “Before going to France, she had already engaged with the Nidoïsh Rouge scarves, Naisseline [Pioneer movement of the identity claim Kanak] and had made a first stay in prison after the distribution of leaflets in the language [Kanak]”, recalls Elie Poigoune, former president of the Human Rights League of New Caledonia and a great figure in the independence struggle.
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