A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

I thought of weather like a sailor’s words carried on the wind, to the memory of a
lover trailing the wake of the moving ship like a flock of white birds dipping and
wheeling and dancing alongside a green shadow furling over mutable water (149).
Hongo’s interpretation of Hawai’i is clear: “The village was thus a living form of heaven,
an afterlife that I stepped into and took lessons from. Its villagers were to me all prophets
and angels. And I a traveler in their paradise” (291-2). Here is a clear case of a self-made
paradise, an inner haven, and of the attempt of a reclamation of everything that has been
taken away.
On the spiritual level, Hongo succeeds, finding reconciliation, peace of mind, and
the words to chant his genealogy. But there is also the actual material loss that his family
had to suffer: His parents were tricked out of their store inheritance, and subsequently left
the Big Island; in the end, they left Hawai’i as a whole behind. The author describes
himself circling the store, in person as well as by relating episodes from the past. He
finally visits his step-grandmother, the person responsible for the family’s expulsion.
Finding a frail old woman, fearful and somehow unattainable, he lets go of the past, the
inheritance, and the question of blame. Did he intend a parable, an example of the pan-
Hawaiian experience of loss of land, tied up with the devaluation of culture and the quest
for identity that all colonized races have faced? It seems that for Hongo going to Hawai’i
was a way of tackling and overcoming the ‘Asian’ silence about the past that he had
suffered in California. His appropriated Localness helps him establish a realm in which
questions can be posed and answered, in which untold stories can be related and even
altered.
His reflections on being a postcolonial, dislocated, surrounded by silence about
the past, are representative:
a postcolonial – one absented from the blindered repose of an innocent belonging
to a conquered place and a people. A stolen child […] We fear something.
Without the larger family, without root in time and place, without the oracle bones
of ancestry, we rage. […] panicking, feeling the uncontrollable confusion, the fear
of being found, the fear of being lost, the revulsion of being nothing to this world,
a no one without place, without people, without history (334-5).
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