A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

contract laborers, Stone of Kannon and Water of Life. In his novels, Bushnell included
historical figures such as Captain Cook, Hawaiian royalty and leading men of state, or
Father Damien, the famous Catholic priest who lived with the lepers. “Ozzie,” a
descendant of Portuguese and other European immigrants, attempted to combine gripping
storylines with the depiction of complex and problematic historical situations. He created
narrators whose point of view allows the author to reflect on their time or specific
situation: In The Return of Lono for example, the young crew member of Cook’s voyage
tells his story after fifty years have elapsed, and can thus wisely comment: “The truth is
that I saw, but I did not see all. […] I saw only what I wanted to see. My only comfort
now is that I had much company in my paradise of Fools, for few among our joyful group
that day saw the signs which denoted that with us the Serpent was also come into
Eden.” 302 While Bushnell’s narrators may be prejudiced or even racist, they are the means
to illustrate historical situations, never spokespersons for the writer himself. Besides
paving the way with his own works, the author tirelessly challenged Hawaii’s writers to
tell their stories in their own voices, calling for the ‘Great Hawaiian Novel,’ and warning
that if “us local kids” will not write it, “the outsider” surely will. 303
Another eminent figure was the late John Dominis Holt, a “descendant of
Hawaiian and Tahitian chiefs, European nobility, and New England missionaries” 304 who
wrote nonfiction, short stories, a play about Queen Lili’uokalani, and one of the great
novels about Hawai’i, Waimea Summer. Written in 1976 and republished in 1998, it is set
in an old hapa haole family in the 1930s. Hawaiian superstition and white elitist thinking
characterize the people who live in remote Waimea on the Big Island, and young Mark,
visiting from Honolulu, is torn between the old and new: “They were totally inimical to
microbiology, Hawaiian history and literary craftsmanship” (Honolulu Advertiser, 08/24/2002. Aged 89,
Bushnell had died on August 21 st ).
302 Quoted in Sumida 1982: 296. Such ‘seeing but not seeing all’ is a common phenomenon in narratives of
discovery. Informed by paradise myths and Oceanist discourse, what visitors to Hawai’i (and other such
imaginatively predetermined places) ‘saw’ was always already shaped by their expectations and by such
‘models’ as the noble savage and the beautiful island maiden. There is the often cited example of Arthur
Barlowe’s account of his 1584-85 voyage to what is today North Carolina: Two days before land was
sighted, he recounted that the crew “smelled so sweet and so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst
of some delicate garden abounding with all kind of odoriferous flowers” (quoted from an excerpt of “The
First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1,
New York/London 1994, 67-75, here 68). Expectation clouds perception, and our seeing of the ‘other’ is
always already culturally conditioned. Objectivity is thus impossible.
303 See Maxine Hong Kingston’s account of the Talk Story conference in Kingston 1998: 47-51.
304 Stanton 1997: 7. Holt’s essay “On Being Hawaiian,” published in 1964, was an early exploration of
native Hawaiian identity.
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