A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

eneath purple resort
toilets: Civilization’s
fecal vision
in the native
heart of darkness (3, “Hawai’i”). 393
While chiefly condemning haole and Japanese – tourists, developers, and missionary
descendants – Trask does not exempt her own people from criticism, accusing them of
complicity and forgetfulness: “Makes / me sick to hear / how easily / genealogy flows /
away. […] Dismissing history / with a servant’s / grin” (64, “Colonization”). Thinking
about her own contribution to genealogy, she offers:
But I have no sons
to give, no line of
immortality.
I am slyly
reproductive: ideas
books, history
politics, reproducing
the rope of resistance
for unborn generations […]
weaving fine baskets
of resilience
to carry our daughters in (55-6, “Sons”).
While Trask ostensibly displays her indigeneity, her poetry is refracted with references to
her non-Native lover (“I wonder at the resolve / in your clear blue eyes,” 63) and her
Western education (“I thought you were star-crossed / a Shakespearean figure,” 62),
paradoxically rendering it the more authentic. This education – complete with a Ph.D.
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 – has, among other things, enabled
her to take “soul possession of a language which had once forcibly replaced her mother
tongue, but which now she has made her own instrument, using it against those forces of
domination to which language never finally belongs.” 394
393 A heiau is an ancient place of worship, usually a stone platform which may carry a sort of stone altar.
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