A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

“Especially poignant was the desire to return to an earlier time. […] My story seems
much longer ago than it was because of the remarkable and nearly overwhelming changes
that have come about in Hawaii. It is almost a dream world, perhaps an edenic or golden
age. But it was real.” 324 This can explain the numerous references to an unattainable
paradise as well as the tableau-like quality of her characters and situations that seem
strangely out of time. The most interesting thoughts in The Wild Wind, however, speak of
the chances of hybridity. Here, Sinclair had been ahead of her time, when statehood for
Hawai’i was delayed in Congress due to its racially mixed population:
children who with their mingled white and Hawaiian blood would know how to
blend the old and the new, who would understand the subtle, complicated forces
of the modern world, itself suffering from the clash of cultures. […] She would
break down the racial barrier, and chart a faint little trail toward the world of
harmony that might be. 325
Her more recent texts, like the short story “The Feather Lei,” reiterate a pressing sense of
loss in regard to the past:
Hawaiian traditions are becoming fragile from the wear of time and the tear of
constant interpretation. […] Sometimes I take the lei from my dresser drawer and
touch the feathers, soft, fragile, yet strong, persisting. The color of them is still as
glowing as the moment long ago when they were first plucked from the bird and
sewed together. I try to imagine life nearly a hundred years ago. I watch the life
around me today. They are two different worlds – how could the earlier one
transform itself into this strident, brutal today, clanging with metal and
concrete? 326
Sinclair’s writings are nostalgic in the best sense, invested in cherishing Hawai’i,
salvaging its past, its indigenous beauty, the mana of its native people. Albeit tending
towards the sentimental or even naïve, her texts never have the marketing quality that
Paul Lyons has termed “histouric.”
In his critical review of Kiana Davenport’s 1994 novel Shark Dialogues, Lyons
heralds the book as “the first Hawai’i-centered novel by an author with Hawaiian blood to
324 Marjorie Sinclair, Kona, Honolulu 1986: 4.
325 Marjorie Sinclair, The Wild Wind, Honolulu 1986: 69, 248.
326 Marjorie Sinclair, “The Feather Lei,” in Stanton 1997: 210-216.
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