A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

make a major mainland publishing splash,” adding that its “swashbuckling storytelling
[is] likely to alter outside readers’ understanding of Hawai’i and its history more than the
fine, place-centered writing being produced in the islands at the present.” 327 A Hawaiian
family history spanning six generations, the book’s epic dimension, historical sweep, and
sheer bulk are reminiscent of Michener’s Hawaii, while the family’s beginnings from two
castaways, a Yankee whaler who jumped ship and a runaway Tahitian princess, hark back
to adventure romances and pay tribute to Herman Melville, one of the writers Davenport
says she admires. Shark Dialogues blends historical fact (annexation, leprosy, etc.) with
magic realism, melodrama, and rampant exoticism. As the novel unfolds in a
kaleidoscope of retrospectives, conversations, “talk story” times, dreams, and visions, the
reader, together with the protagonists, has to reorder events into a coherent history.
Underneath the adventure and the tragedy, the text enacts a contemporary struggle
to establish links to one’s ancestry, to reclaim one’s genealogy, enabling the formation of
an identity based on history, ethnicity, and a connection to place. 328 This corresponds to
the author’s own awakening of cultural awareness:
In this sense, the long trip of writing and researching a book with the size and
density of Shark Dialogues is an implied literary homecoming and autobiography:
after three books unrelated to Hawai’i and written under the first name Diana,
Davenport – who grew up in Hawai’i, but has lived on the East Coast since
graduating from the University of Hawai’i – reclaims the name Kiana. 329
The family history is meant to be both exemplary and metonymic. In other words,
Davenport’s characters are symbolic figures, larger than life, serving as almost mythical
explanations of a development that led to the present conditions. They seem to be more
vehicles for illustrating an argument, a viewpoint on history, than real people. This
applies to the two outcasts who were witnesses to the fatal changes sweeping Hawai’i at
the turn of the nineteenth century, to the unyielding Pono, who is endowed with psychic
powers, and to her lover Duke, the leprosy-stricken sum total of a romance hero: a
327 Paul Lyons, review of Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues, in Manoa 7 No. 1 (Summer 1995): 265-7,
here 265.
328 As stated in the historical survey, the importance of genealogy dates back to pre-contact Hawai’i. The
ruling ali’i justified and maintained their status through genealogical chants that traced lineage back to
divine ancestry. One of the tasks of the kahuna was to memorize, recite, and alter, if necessary, these chants
(see Buck 1993: 34). Hawaiian identity and status within the community were and still are strongly based on
family history.
329 Lyons 1995: 266.
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