A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

I had been here nearly thirty years when I got an idea for an actual Hawai’i novel. And I figured that three
5.2.3 The Dilemma of Being Haole
decades of familiarity with a place kind of qualified me.
Ian MacMillan – Interview with Samrat Upadhyay 406
The term haole literally means “without breath,” ha being the breath of life that is shared
in such many-faceted words as aloha. Thus the initial designation the Hawaiians gave to
foreigners, or white people, may well have had negative connotations already. Albeit or
because of their ever-increasing influence in Hawaiian history, haole has become a
derogatory term, a label that nobody wants to wear. The opposition Local-haole probably
derives from the pre-WWII era, when a growing military presence began to cause open
hostilities as evidenced in the Massie case. Though translated today as “Caucasian,” the
word also connotes outsider, intruder, nosey and greedy foreigner, legatee of explorers,
missionaries, and sugar barons.
In several of Ian MacMillan’s short stories, the contemporary position of
Caucasians in Local society is negotiated. In “Termites,” a short story from his 1998
collection Exiles from Time, the male narrator is troubled by his wife’s bluntness in
“politically sensitive” matters, as exemplified by her newspaper column: As a descendant
of poor Swedish immigrants who had no part in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy,
she refuses to accept charges of responsibility and shrugs off “the burden of white
guilt.” 407 When their blonde little daughter angrily asks if the family was not “at least part
Japanese,” she replies that they are “Caucasians, of Swedish and English descent.” The
seven-year old goes on: “But aren’t I one local people den?” and is lectured: “’First,’ she
said, ‘it’s ‘then’, not ‘den’. Second, the word ‘local’ here would mean those whose
families have been here generations, and we have been here fifteen years. Third, it’s ‘am I
not a local person?’ Not, ‘aren’t I a people?’” (12). Nevertheless, the teenage son is sure
he is “as local as you can get,” and the following scenes of interaction with the neighbors,
406 In Hawai’i Review 22 No. 2 (Summer 1999): 50-62, here 51.
407 Ian MacMillan, “Termites,” in Exiles from Time, Honolulu 1998: 13. MacMillan, who is renowned for
his World War II novels (and has been labeled “the Stephen Crane of World War II” by Kurt Vonnegut),
grew up in rural New York State and came to Hawai’i to teach creative literature. He probably has a good
idea of what it is like to be a newcomer in the islands.
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