class guide for Melal (PDF) - Windward Community College

Apartheid in the Pacific?
1.
JOB ANNOUNCEMENT FOR WORK ON KWAJALEIN.
US ARMY SPACE & MISSILE DEF CMD, RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT &
ACQUISITION, TEST AND EVALUATION CENTER
Job Title: Air Traffic Control Specialist (Terminal)
Salary Range:
64,407.00 - 83,724.00 USD /year
About the Position: Work is performed at numerous locations through the
Kwajalein Atoll, which is located approximately 6,000 miles from the CONUS
office, with a prime contractor primarily responsible for the technical support.
Remoteness of location and peculiar conditions such as the severely corrosive
environment, difficulty of travel between sites, and ownership of the atoll by
foreign people (Marshallese) further complicates management of the effort.
Americans rightly take pride in the ending of slavery after the Civil War and the end of
segregation a hundred years later. And yet, as the above 2009 job posting makes clear by
referring to the Marshallese as a foreign people, a form of segregation still exists in the
American-dominated atolls and islands of Micronesia, especially Kwajalein which was a
support base for nuclear testing in the Pacific and, later, for America’s “Star Wars”
strategic defense initiative. The plight of the Marshallese is at the heart of Robert
Barclay’s Melal. Using common features of the novel—interesting characters, a strong
sense of place, fanciful depictions of gods and demons, exciting plot developments,
flashbacks, irony, foreshadowing, facts of history, personal experience, and, above all,
creative imagination—Barclay’s novel draws readers into a remarkable, enlightening
fictional account of a central, but unfortunately neglected, moral issue. As Chief
Bromden says in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “It’s the truth even if it
didn’t happen.”
Kwajalein is the largest of the twenty-nine low-lying coral atolls and five single islands
that make up the Marshalls. First colonized by the Spanish, then Germans and Japanese,
Kwajalein and other islands were devastated during WWII when American forces
overcame the Japanese. The subsequent American nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak
Atolls forced the removal of many Marshallese from their ancestral homelands and
caused lingering radiation poisoning for Marshallese in islands downwind of the
explosions. Adults and children suffered painful after-effects and many women gave birth
to “jellyfish babies.” As a support base for the Bravo tests and later for the “Star Wars”
strategic defense initiative, Kwajalein Island houses several thousand American men
women and children who enjoy all the luxuries of a gated community, including a golf
course, swimming pools, movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary.
Ebeye island is another matter entirely as Chad Blair, who reviewed the novel for
Honolulu Weekly, makes graphically clear: “Over 12,000 Marshallese are crammed into

an island slum roughly the size of Ala Moana center.” They suffer frequent electrical
outages and insufficient sewage removal. The vast lagoon is polluted near shore and is
off limits further out because of unarmed missiles fired from California. Jobs are few,
supplies expensive, and health care poor. Pacific Islands Development expert Robert
Kiste calls Ebeye “the American version of Apartheid in the Pacific.” Readers of Melal
are quickly exposed to this reality. On Good Friday 1981 Rujen Keju starts his day trying
to kill a rat in the falling apart, “army-built, concrete blockhouse” he shares with
“fourteen clan members and eight family members” (3). Fortunate to have a job on
Kwajalein, he must take a ferry three miles to work every day to a place where
Marshallese are only allowed by permit and are forbidden to enter most of the
establishments, including the commissary where inexpensive goods are available only to
Americans. Rujen, though, is one of the lucky ones; most of the Marshallese are either
relatives of wage earners or evacuees from other islands.
This is a harsh background for a novel that is sometimes humorous and whimsical as well
as somber. Yet at its heart remains the question, What does it take to break down race
barriers? One clear way not to do it is provided by the story of Rujen’s nephew, Lazarus,
who has been having a clandestine affair with an American woman he hopes to marry in
order to become a citizen. But once the affair becomes known, the girlfriend is too
ashamed to acknowledge her active role: “Melody didn’t even say good-bye, didn’t even
look at me, when they dragged me out of there [her apartment] and took me to jail” (278).
The novel does, though, suggest some ways that progress can be made. Most obvious is
the dramatic change Rujen undergoes during the course of the day, with one mishap
following another. Despite having lost his wife to radiation poisoning nine years earlier,
Rujen has decided that protesting against the American presence, as his father had, is
useless. Instead he has come to accept the American presence and is now proud of being
the highest level Marshallese worker at the sewage treatment plant and feels that being an
usher at the Catholic church on Kwajalein is what defines him. And yet, after having his
rubber boots stolen and his bike vandalized, Rujen begins to lose his optimism about
Ebeye’s future. This unraveling is furthered when Rujen, while having lunch at the turtle
pond, finds himself unexpectedly taking the Marshallese position about the dolphins and
antagonizing Rick and the other Americans. His epiphany occurs when Rujen
accidentally crashes the crucifix during the Good Friday mass. Already covered with
chum and smelling like shit, having dirtied both the money collected to save the dolphins
and the holy water, he now begins to understand Catholicism from a Marshallese
perspective. Previously he had simply memorized the liturgy without understanding it;
now he comes to view Christ as “a man, a once living breathing man whose ancient land
had for so long been occupied and dominated…. For Rujen to understand Jesus Christ
this way was to come to an understanding of himself, not just as a man but as a
Marshallese and as the son of his father” (273). This new sense of himself brings Rujen
closer not only to his father but to his son.
Jebro, from the beginning, has been more like his grandfather than his father. Named
after “the king of the stars, the greatest hero ever in the Marshall Islands,” Jebro is proud
of his “long extra pinkie . . . which he boasted could bring fish by wiggling in the water”

(4). Just back from two years on an outer island, he is determined to take his younger
brother across the lagoon to Tar-Woj, his birthplace and the resting place of Rujen’s
father—despite its being within the missile range. But unlike his older brother, Nuke has
no interest in or knowledge of Marshallese culture. Named after “the most powerful thing
on earth” (4), his world is shaped by cigarettes, gangs, suicides. To him and many
Marshallese Ebeye was “New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, the closest a
Marshallese might ever get to experiencing the life such places offered” (79). The sharp
contrast between these two brothers mirrors Rujen’s internal conflict and the broader
cultural conflict.
The struggle between good and evil in the realm of the gods reinforces the message that
the Marshallese must begin to regain a sense of cultural identity. The trickster Etao
provides a sense of lightheartedness that, it is implied, is an important part of life and can,
unexpectedly, drive off the forces of evil. And the dwarf Noniep, the last of his race, is
determined to save the souls of all the dead jellyfish babies and other Marshallese. Yet
after Etao has saved him from the demons, Noniep comes to realize that the island of the
dead is not the right place for him to take the souls. Instead, the role of the dead should be
to go back where they came from and be spirit guardians, like the frigate bird that saves
Nuke from drowning.
Barclay is well aware that it will take more than renewed pride in Marshallese heritage
for the racial and cultural divide to be healed. The Americans, too, must come to a new
understanding of the Marshallese. This is provided by the interaction of Jebro and Nuke
with the American boys—Travis, Boyd and Kerry. While Boyd is an insensitive and selfcentered
teenager, Travis is intrigued by Jebro’s ability to anticipate the movements of
schools of fish. Kerry, a newcomer to Kwajalein, rejects Boyd’s view of the Marshallese
and begins to open up to cross-cultural awareness. All three boys are shocked by the
condition of Ebeye when they drop off Jebro and Nuke—none of them had previously
been aware of how shitty Ebeye really was. Yet Travis is impressed with how happy the
little kids are playing at the edge of the lagoon. It seems clear that he and Jebro have
formed a bond that will lead to a better understanding of each other. This is a small but
significant beginning.
Melal is a significant contribution to literature of the Pacific. It won the Harriet
Goldsberry Award in Hawai`i and was a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Prize for
fiction. Barnes and Noble selected Melal for its Discover Great New Writers program.
Maori writer Patricia Grace’s enthusiastic endorsement of the novel highlights its
significance. Although Barclay is not a Pacific Islander, he knows the situation in
Kwajalein first hand. When he was nine, his father took a job at the U.S. missile range
and moved his family there. Since graduating from Kwajalein Junior/Senior High school,
Barclay has returned to Kwajalein many times for visits and a couple of year-long stints
of employment. One can’t help but suspect that Travis in the novel comes close to
representing Barclay’s own journey to understanding.

Annotated Bibliography
Barclay, Robert. Melal (University of Hawai`i Press, 2002). This paperback edition is the
only one so far. All page references are necessarily to this edition.
Barclay, Robert. His website at http://windward.hawaii.edu/people/robert_barclay/
contains links to a number of reviews of Melal.
Blair, Chad. “A particularly bad Friday: First-time novelist Robert Barclay spins a
horrific and hopeful Marshallese tale.” (Honolulu Weekly, November 2002). This review
is particularly interesting because Blair, like Barclay, graduated from Kwajalein
Junior/Senior High School.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Viking Press, 1962). Chief Bromden is
the first person narrator and a central character of the novel, set in an insane asylum. For
most of the novel Bromden appears to others to be deaf and dumb. This caused the critic
Leslie Fiedler to refer to him as “the invisible American.” Many comparisons, of course,
can be made between the treatment of “redskins” and the Marshallese. Most people know
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from the 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson rather
than from the novel. However, the movie minimizes the importance of Chief Bromden
and Kesey refused to have his name on the credits.
Kiste, Robert. Review of Melal: A Novel of the Pacific (The Contemporary Pacific,
Spring 2004). As a fellow in the East-West Center’s Pacific Islands Development
Program, Kiste is able to provide useful information about the setting of the novel.
Shel Hershinow
Professor Emeritus, Literature
Kapi`olani Community College