Clémence Maillochon (Université de Bretagne Occidentale), ‘“Behind the curtain of flowers”: poet Henri Hiro and the antinuclear movement in French Polynesia’

From 1960 to 1996, France carried out 210 nuclear tests in the Sahara and the Pacific. These experiments caused profound societal transformations in local Indigenous communities. In French Polynesia, the construction of the ‘Centre d’Expérimentation du Pacifique’ in 1963 led to a rapid urbanization of Tahiti and the pauperization of a population already traumatized by the Christianization and colonization of their land.

During the nuclear testing period, the loss of cultural markers, such as the everyday use of Indigenous language or food system enhanced physical and psychological traumatizes. But in the 1970s, groups of activists formed through Oceania, and opposed resistances to military activities in the Pacific. Polynesian artists and activists rejected nuclear bombs and contested France's sovereignty over their territory. One of them, perhaps the most famous today, was the Tahitian poet Henri Hiro.

Growing up in a nuclearized Tahiti, Henri Hiro studied at a protestant faculty in the May 68 aftermath, and then found his way as a figure of the cultural renewal movement. After walking against the nuclear tests each with his close friends and relatives in the late 1970s, this movement came to find worldwide supports.

Clémence Maillochon is a postdoctoral researcher in history at l’Université de Bretagne-Occidentale. Her researches are focused on the history of French nuclear testing in the Sahara and the Pacific and her recent publications address transnational militant solidarities (“Customary paths toward denuclearization and decolonization: Mā’ohi and Kanak activists passing through lo Larzac “, Journal of Pacific History, March 2024) and the question of nuclear colonialism in the Sahara (Christopher R. Hill, Clémence Maillochon, “‘Stealing fire from heaven’: Odette du Puigaudeau and French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara”, International Review of Environmental History, 2023).