A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

American Samoa to maintain his integrity and sanity, he wrote several plays that center
on cultural or ethnic identity and its fragility or loss. His work and philosophy are as
much informed by education and experience as by traditional Polynesian performance
such as the Samoan fale aitu, literally “house of spirits.” He describes this clowning
practice as “not an aesthetic experience, but a psychosocial experience. It tends more
towards politics than art.” 344 Moreover, he reasons that “In a world that’s become
increasingly tense, formalized, and over-intellectualized, comedy seems to me a very
healthy, wonderful release.” 345 The fusion of postmodern play and ancient release ritual
opens up a space for lucid insights into the nature of contemporary Pacific situatedness,
envisioned as caught up between a fast-moving present and an almost forgotten past.
Reviewing Kneubuhl’s life and work, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, a fellow Samoan
scholar, notes “an apparent conflation of identities – Hawaiian and Samoan – into the
broader category of ‘Polynesian.’” 346 Thus, while his work could as well be discussed
under the ethnicity heading, the pervasive slippage of ethnic identification in Kneubuhl’s
statements points to a different focus of his undeniably ‘ethnic’ plays. Such a focus seems
to be a creative coming to terms with the past.
Three of Kneubuhl’s later pieces belong together in that they “are really about the
making of plays, […] about the writer and his search.” 347 Written in 1975 but not staged
until 1998, Mele Kanikau: A Pageant experiments with “the idea of the writer-creating-
the-story-which-in-turn-creates-the-writer” 348 as well as with self-referentiality, inserting a
hula performance into a rehearsal of the pageant, which is another performance that forms
the bulk of the play, a third performance. This Chinese box structure is used with great
skill, effecting slippage, uncertainty, and even absurdity. The title refers to the Local
tradition of showy historical pageants, and the Hawaiian part translates as song or chant
of lamentation. What is lamented here is the loss of native Hawaiian identity and
343 Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, “John Kneubuhl’s ‘Polynesian’ Theater at the Crossroads: At Play in the
Fields of Cultural Identity,” in Amerasia 26 No. 2 (2000): 209-33, here 214-5. Jackie Pualani Johnson
elaborates: “He wrote the play after bristling at an editorial that demanded a ban on pidgin in schools, since
he felt pidgin to be ‘a very poetic thing’” (Afterword to John Kneubuhl, Think of a Garden and Other
Plays, Honolulu 1997: 254).
344 Vilsoni Hereniko, “An Interview with John A. Kneubuhl,” in Manoa 5 No.1 (Summer 1993): 99-105,
here 105. Kneubuhl died in February 1992.
345 Hereniko 1993: 103.
346 Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2000: 209.
347 Kneubuhl 1997: 257.
348 Ibid.: 260. The play’s “elaborate production demands coupled with the casting of complex bilingual
characters resulted in the decades-long delay in staging” (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2000: 219).
123