When Paul Gauguin departed Tahiti after his first visit in 1893, he took with him his iconic, lush and bold paintings of the island that went on to become some of the most expensive artworks ever sold. But he left one thing behind: his so-called ‘wife’. In reality, she was 11-year-old girl Teha’amana, whom Gauguin had ‘wed’ the afternoon he met, and used time and again as his muse in his work.

It’s unclear how many Tahitian women and girls Gauguin painted, or which of them appear in each work, but what is certain is that his legacy would not exist were it not for them. And yet, like most female muses, their voices have been lost to history.

Now, a powerful new novel by Edinburgh-based author Devika Ponnambalam is putting that loss to rights, giving a voice to Teha’amana and bringing the Tahiti Gauguin encountered to vivid, breathing life. ‘No one talked about the girls, you know,’ says Ponnambalam. ‘In the beginning, I was curious, as a writer, as to what had happened to all the women. Later, once I was writing the book, and had become stronger and fiercer in what I wanted to say, I found I was just really angry that it’s never been explored or talked about.’

Ponnambalam admits her relationship with Gauguin’s work is complicated. Behind her on her wall hangs a copy of one of his paintings. She calls him a genius and says she would never want his art to be cancelled. ‘But I also think, well, where’s the other narrative? Seventeen years ago, it was this absence that led her to embark on a quest to fill those gaps. But the process was far from straightforward, and nor is the resulting book. 

Taking in a range of voices, the story shifts perspective, from Teha’amana herself, to her foster mother, to the spirits and gods of Tahitian mythology, to Gauguin’s daughter Aline, who was the same age as Teha’amana. There are no chapters or labels to denote the speaker and the polyphony seems to echo the complex polytheism of Tahitian mythology, with its shape-shifting gods and recurring refrains. It’s a masterful and extraordinary novel, not only a reclaiming of Teha’amana’s voice but of the autonomy and self-determination of Tahiti itself, freed from Gauguin’s vision into a world of its own making. 

It was difficult for Ponnambalam to build the character of Teha’amana; records are sketchy and even Gauguin referred to her under a different name, Tehura, in his travel journal Noa Noa. But the genesis of Ponnambalam’s ideas won the attention of Creative Scotland, who supported her to embark on a research trip to Tahiti. There she scrubbed gravestones clean trying to find Teha’amana’s name and eventually tracked down some of her descendants, before finding they didn’t want to talk about Gauguin. 

She did encounter a priest though, who informed her Teha’amana had died of syphilis and that she was younger than Gauguin had said (he always maintained she was all of 13). ‘So I had to take all that on board and think, you know what, I think she’s always going to be a mystery. The true story is never going to be told. So I had to decide: what I was going to tell, what was my version of the truth?’

I Am Not Your Eve is out now, published by Bluemoose.