A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

But Hongo is more than a minute observer and an artist with words: Volcano is
the attempt to make one’s personal history meaningful, to deal with the hurt and injustice
of the past, “to make art out of his alienation.” 368 Hongo was born in Hawai’i, grew up in
California, and today is a professor in Oregon. Driven by the wish to fill his genealogy
with life, the author went to the Big Island:
I was born in the village of Volcano, in the back room of the kitchen of a general
store my grandfather built on Volcano Road, twenty-nine miles from Hilo on the
Big Island of Hawaii, the newest in the mid-Pacific chain its first human settlers
called Hava-iti, a name which means, in their ritualized language, ‘the Realm of
the Dead’ or, more simply, ‘Paradise’ (3).
The writer wanted to understand his forebears’ motives and feelings, but more
importantly, he was searching for a place to which he could feel a sense of belonging, in
short, a home. What he found were pieces of memory and story, and a place that was
beautiful, mysterious, captivating: “It was a visual sonata, lavished and detailed as any
jungle fantasy painted by Henri Rousseau” (7). He described a place out of natural history
books, a tableau. It inspired as well as challenged his poetic abilities:
a world of faery and imagination where the dead might dance in the right light,
where the milky river of stars and the swallow-bridge of heaven might set down
and be a passageway between this and the afterlife […] It was obvious to me that
here was both inspiration and difficulty brought together in a relentlessly
spectacular landscape […] I wanted to know the place and I wanted to tie my
name to it, to deliver out of the contact a kind of sacred book – a book of origins
(16, 22, 27).
His book is a manifesto of how he put the pieces together, how he appropriated a place to
make up for personal and collective loss. Cleverly, the natural history angle displaces the
actual history. His text performs an act of re-vision, mapping out his reading of the
landscape. Thus, it impressively displays the power of discourse, the power of words.
And the writer maintains a firm grip on his language throughout, making it flash and take
leaps:
I could feel the earth’s turning under me, the escape of the planet from under its
own aging skin, spouting itself away in gouts of rock and flattering incandescence.
368 Hongo 1995: 241.
138