A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

understands some of the inequities of history now, the grown narrator is still hiding from
the complexities of life:
But now I didn’t even know who the bad guys were. I wanted to lash out at my
shadow enemy. No, not Nicky da Cruise Job, or Khrushchev, or cruise missiles,
but the part of me that is torn, ripped apart, like my drafts of love notes to Lynette,
like my draft notice, the part that won’t let me come up from under the table. 320
Gima notes that the initial mishearing, the school kids’ act of translating what they do not
understand into their own insular Pidgin world, later becomes a “refusal to subscribe to
certain restrictive forms of community.” Nikita Khrushchev, “the spokesman for the
Communist threat,” becomes Nicky da Cruise, “a Mafia-connected chef,” and thus a
threat they can grasp. 321 Morales does best when rendering the larger issues by describing
the lives and thoughts of individual characters. While “Saint Paul in the Promised Land”
traces the history of Filipino bachelors in Hawai’i, “Maka’s Lei Day” refers to a whole
generation of young Vietnam veterans struggling to face life and wondering what went
wrong. Another idiosyncratic feature of this writer’s style is the frequency of
photographic imagery and movie script language on both the textual and the plot level.
This might be a way of warning the reader to be wary of the inherent subjectivity of point
of view, obscured by the apparent objectivity of the camera eye. 322
Marjorie Sinclair has taught in the English Department of UHM for over forty
years. Apart from two novels about domestic conflict in interracial marriages, Kona
(1947) and The Wild Wind (1950), she has written poetry, short fiction, and the biography
of a chiefess. 323 Furthermore, she has published a volume of translations from Hawaiian.
In her foreword to Kona, Sinclair elaborates on the period she describes, Hawaii’s 1930s:
320 Morales 1988: 85. “Daybreak over Haleakala,” a story analyzed in chapter 5.4.2, also addresses the
uncanny feelings triggered by growing up, waking up to politics and injustice. After finding out that his
allegedly haole friend had suppressed and hidden his part-Hawaiian ethnicity, the narrator reasons in the
words of one of his favorite songs, David Bowie’s “Changes:” “You walk around in a smooth groove for
years and years, then one day you turn and face the strange” (98).
321 Gima 1997: 80.
322 Especially prolific are the film and photo images in “Maka’s Lei Day,” for Maka is rather obsessed with
photography and has wanted to be a filmmaker: “In the time it took for a reel change, Maka thought,” (158),
“The scene was quite surreal to Maka; it appeared that he and his father had been given scripts to read, and
were reading each other’s part. […] He even visualized the movie. He was trying to think who could play
his father. Perhaps an older Paul Newman. Aah, but the eyes are too blue” (160). There is also a whole
page written like a script, complete with stage directions (162-3).
323 Marjorie Sinclair, Nahi’ena’ena: Sacred Daughter of Hawai’i, Honolulu 1995. In 1986, her two novels
were republished in Hawai’i.
115