A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

the present. […] Spirits did not thrive in my world of bright lights, clanging streetcars,
and modern plumbing, where scientific education continually refuted the lore which still
clung, like coral clusters on reefs, at the outer edges of memory.” 305 The isolated place
influences the big city kid:
I had the sense that the gods had blessed Waimea as once the God of the Old
Testament had bestowed magical, extravagant beauty upon Eden. […] Waimea
weather has the power and violence of the volcanic peaks, the luxuriance of the
wet upland forests: an atmosphere too rich, too dramatic for the human scale
(11/40).
This paradise is dangerous, it suffocates you with its dusty mansions and backward
attitudes, or it drowns you in superstitions and rain. In the end, a grown Mark manages to
break free from the past, to run from the lure of Waimea. He has realized that ferociously
clinging to a glorious and noble past that is not even discernible anymore keeps the
Waimea people in their self-made paradisiacal prison:
Hawaiian songs too often were a harkening to the past, to your people, reminding
you always of breakdown and defeat. […] Perhaps we all needed to be a little
more indifferent; we whose lives were rooted in the indigenous compost heap of
island history. […] A pagan air, lingering on from earlier days, seemed to
surround us. We had stepped out of time, were really phantoms skittering
perilously close to the outer edges of reality in our play (90/95).
Holt’s interpretation of ‘paradise’ in Waimea Summer recalls the Celtic land of the fairies
which is beauti- and bountiful but can imprison you forever.
A third role model for Local novelists is Milton Murayama, whose plantation
novelette All I Asking for Is My Body can be said to have paved the way for the
contemporary Hawaiian novel, setting the theme, local history, and employing Pidgin to
convey atmosphere and authentic flavor. Having met with resistance from commercial
publishers to his innovative presentation of plantation voices, the writer eventually
published his novel himself. Having grown up in a Maui sugar plantation camp, he
authentically relates the appalling living conditions, the poor pay, the strict hierarchy, and
the racial segregation which was perpetuated by the workers: He describes how, if
Filipinos went on strike, the Japanese would go to work as strike breakers; how the
305 John Dominis Holt, Waimea Summer, Honolulu 1998: 10, 48.
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