A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

place for them on the map of ideas and ideologies as it is reflected in and through
literature. 10
In a literal sense, however, Hawai’i is no ‘virgin land’ or uncharted territory today. One
only has to think of O’ahu’s dense military development, from Pearl Harbor to Schofield
Barracks to Hickham Airfield. Almost a quarter of the island is occupied by military
installations and barracks. 11 Waikiki is marked on tourists’ mental maps as a prime
destination. The island of Kaua’i is known to most people as the filming location for
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, but is much less known as one of the places boasting
the wettest spot on earth. On the island of Moloka’i, the Kalaupapa peninsula has been
used for decades as a leper settlement, today a rather morbid attraction. Maui’s quaint old
town Lahaina was an important whaling harbor in the early 1800s. The Big Island, or
Hawai’i proper, features the world’s most active volcano and hosts the Ironman triathlon,
but in 1778, its Kealakekua Bay was the site of Captain Cook’s infamous death at the
hands of enraged natives. Small Kaho’olawe has been used by the U.S. military as a
target island for naval and aerial bombardment training since 1953. Only in 1993, after
having become a symbol of resistance against the destruction and desecration of sacred
Hawaiian soil, the island was transferred to native Hawaiian control; cleanup of
unexploded ordnance is going on. I will return to all those places, for they are haunted
with history, inscribed by events, fraught with hidden narratives. Thus, another map can
only add another layer to the palimpsest of representations. 12 Then what is the use of
adding?
10 Eckhard Breitinger, “Recent Anglophone Drama in Cameroon,” in Cedric C. Barfoot/Theo D’Haen
(eds.), Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1993: here 140.
11 One can be sure the most avid mapping has gone on here, as well as constant satellite surveillance. And
who knows on how many target maps Oahu has figured prominently for just this reason: the island also
houses a vast storage of A- and H-bombs.
12 The term palimpsest, originally referring to a parchment on which several inscriptions had been made
after earlier ones had been erased, with traces left of the overwritten layers, has been employed to account
for the way “in which pre-colonial culture as well as the experience of colonization are continuing aspects
of a post-colonial society’s developing cultural identity” (Ashcroft et al. 1998: 174). The palimpsest
metaphor acknowledges that ineradicable aspects of the past shape the present, and, most likely, also the
future.
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