Greece Never Existed

Andre Breton and Keiji, with notes by Scott Hamilton

RS: This new translation of Andre Breton's poem Rano Raraku was supplied by Indonesian-Australian activist and linguist Keiji, whose translated documents from Indonesia's 2025 uprising were featured in an earlier Reef Shark post. Notes by Scott Hamilton follow the poem.

Rano Raraku

How beautiful the world is

when Greece never existed

when the Persians did not pass

My horse is grazing at the bottom of a crater

The bird-men follow the movement of the carver's hand

They circle my head because I am also there

three quarters stuck and joking with the ethnographers

during that amicable Southern night

They will not pass

The plain is so vast and that the advancing hordes look ridiculous

One by one each empire falls into an abyss

How beautiful the world is

Greece never existed

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1945. Europe's cities are scree and craters and stagnant water. America is an arms factory working twenty-four hours a day. Andre Breton paces in his study, and also along the rim of Rano Raraku, the extinct volcano where the living stone heads of Rapa Nui's moai rise. 

For decades Breton has been trying to find an escape route, a way out of Western civilisation. Like Picasso and Giacometti and Moore, he has hoarded sculpted figures from Oceania, knowing that they are not relics or curiosities but emissaries sent from alien and hospitable civilisation. He has read the reports of ethnographers, interrogating their lacunae and prejudices. Unable to cross the blue plains and plateaux of the Pacific, he has crossed the sand seas of southwest America, where Hopi villages rise on islands of high rocks. He has apprenticed himself to Hopi shamans and historians.

Breton is like the survivor of some catastrophe, crouching in the cold basement of a collapsed apartment building, flicking through the channels of a shortwave radio, searching for a sign, a signal, a broadcast, from some place beyond the rubble. 

Breton's poem 'Rano Raraku' was written to accompany an exhibition of Oceanic art he organised in 1945. Rapa Nui had long dominated the imagination of the Surrealists. When they made their famous map of the world in 1928, the Surrealists shrunk Europe and the United States and inflated the size of Pacific islands like Rapa Nui and New Britain by more than ten thousand percent. 

Like a negative theologian contemplating god, Breton understood Oceania partly through what it was not. He knew that no Oceanic empire had ever ravaged the world with gunboats and machine guns. He knew that no Polynesian or Melanesian tyrant had ever built concentration camps with gas chambers. 

But Breton had an understanding of the content of Oceanic civilisation that went beyond the cult of the noble savage fostered by Rousseau and Gauguin. As Selina Tusitala Marsh put it, the devotees of that cult saw Oceania as the 'erogenous zone of the world'. Their Tahitians and Marquesans and Papuans existed only from the waist down. 

By contast, Breton was excited by the intellectual accomplishments of Oceania. With its mixture of exquisite craftsmanship and fearless imagination, Oceanic art showed him that the peoples of the region had succeded in integrating the left and right sides of the brain in a way that Plato and Descartes had not. By creating monumental architecture and complex irrigation systems but not a pharoah and a repressive state, Melanesians implied that, unlike many European peoples, they had found ways to organise themselves without sacrificing their freedom. 

'Rano Raraku' is not just a poem but a manifesto. Rapa Nui and by extension Oceania are alternatives and substitutes for Greece; the world becomes 'beautiful' as Europe evaporates and Rapa Nui and other islands swell into new continents in Breton's excited mind. Breton did not reject the Greece of Heraclitus or Diogenes or Theognis; he remained receptive, all his life, to the radical and neglected parts of Europe's classical heritage. But he rejected the Greece of Plato and Aristotle and the Academy: the Greece that underlay Western civilisation. He rejected Plato's call for the expulsion of poets from the ideal society and his use of the Forms to devalue nature and human experience. He rejected Aristotle's mania for categories and distrust of the ludic and random. He rejected the cold marble pillars of the Academy's thousand latter-day imitators. 

Breton's poem celebrates the 'birdmen' carved into the sides of Rapa Nui's caves. The same figures populated hundreds of drawings, paintings, and collages by his Surrealist colleague Max Ernst. With the 'birdmen' and their other hybrid creatures, Oceanic artists reconcile humanity with nature, showing their interdependence. Breton's line 'They shall not pass' recalls the rallying cry of the defenders of Madrid from Franco's hordes. The war against fascism in Spain was lost, but Breton hopes that Oceania will survive as a redoubt of humanity. It is worth noting how radically optimistic he was. In 1945 the indigenous people of Rapa Nui had been restricted to a tiny corner of their tiny island. The Chilean state had given the rest to a family of virulently racist Scottish sheep farmers and their thuggish employees. It was eighty-two years since slavers had raided the island, stealing most of the men and leaving behind devastating respiratory diseases. The population had collapsed, and knowledge of rongorongo, the exquisite indigenous script, had been lost. 

In 1945 colonial powers still controlled almost all of Oceania. The Dutch had been pushed out of Indonesia by Japan, but were about to start fighting to regain it from local nationalists. Portugal had already reoccupied Timor, and the French were putting down uprisings by the Tonkinese they had imported to Vanuatu. In the nineteenth century Oceanic societies like Hawai'i, the Waikato Kingdom, and the Luzon Cordillera had begun to find indigenous routes to modernisation, but these pioneering countermodernities were broken by invasion and land confiscation. 

And yet Breton's optimism has proved at least partly justified. In the decades after he wrote his poems a series of Oceanic societies won independence, and campaigns to revivify and extend indigenous culture accompanied fights against colonial administration. Today Oceania boasts some of the world's most dynamic art, and several nations in the region, most notably Vanuatu, are experimenting once again with indigenous paths to development. In Vanuatu and a dozen other Oceanic societies, most people still live outside the capitalist mode of production, on their own land.

Rapa Nui remains under Chilean rule, but the Scottish sheep lords are long gone, and in the twenty-first century militant protests for independence and land reform have repeatedly shocked Santiago. Artists like Vaitiare Pakarati have extended the tradition that gave us moai and rongorongo. 

Breton's rejection of mainstream European society and openness to other cultures remain inspiring today, but we must also recognise his limitations, which were partly imposed by history. Because of the cordon sanitaire thrown up by colonialism, he was unable to engage in a dialogue with the Oceanic artists he so admired. He had to rely on European sources—the works of ethnographers, for example—for much of his understanding of the culture of Rapa Nui and Oceania. 

For decades now, though, dialogues between Oceania and the West have been taking place. The great Tongan thinker Futa Helu made his 'Atenisi University into a place where palangi and indigenous scholars could talanoa over a kava bowl. Epeli Hau'ofa's writings and his school of art in Suva have inspired Western as well as indigenous scholars and creatives. Many other examples of exchanges could be given. For palangi like me, Breton opened a road, even if he could not walk down it. —SH

Futa Helu disrupts European thought in this revision of Raphael's The School of Athens. The collage was made by Firita-Kik Velt, the Dutch-Tongan physicist who taught alongside Helu for years at 'Atenisi University.

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