A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

mainland term, or ‘Hawaiian’ literature, which the locals know means native
Hawaiian literature). 30
Although this definition is already laden with associations as well as exclusions, I will
take its qualifier, ‘Local,’ to label the body of texts I am dealing with, contemporary
literature from Hawai’i in English, regardless of the writers’ ethnicities. The term Local
and its connotations will be explored and expanded to interpret the material together, for
while its usage reveals fissures and contestations for literary and literal ground, the
common aspects of the texts will become obvious. 31
The subsequent question is whom to include in this ‘Local literature.’ There are
common denominators, aspects that can be taken as indicators of a specific
‘Hawaiianness,’ or ‘Localness’ in texts that are as diverse as the people who make up the
population of Hawai’i. I will argue that these constituents, these signifiers of a Local text
are
- a profound sense of loss,
- the importance of history and genealogy,
- the depiction of an ethnic experience, or a multi-ethnic experience,
- the use and significance of both the Hawaiian language and of the Creole vernacular,
- and lastly, but really of foremost concern, the creation of a place through writing.
This inductive list should by no means be prescriptive or exclusive. However, I have
found few exceptions, since Local literature is fundamentally a literature of place. It
combines natural history with island eulogy, arguments for conservation and
compensation with evocations of the volcano’s sublimity, the tsunami’s ravage, and the
rainbow’s beauty. Texts convey an aloha’aina, love of the land.
Still, why cannot Hawaii’s literature simply be included with American literature,
swallowed up by the whale, so to speak? The writer James Michener, who came to live
on O’ahu in the 1950s, arrogantly did so, extending the American Dream to the islands:
Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the
barrios of the Philippines, […] Bring your own food, your own gods, your own
30 Darrell Lum, “Local Literature and Lunch,” in Eric Chock/Darrell H. Y. Lum (eds.), The Best of Bamboo
Ridge, The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly, Honolulu 1986: 3-5, here: 3.
31 I will write ‘Local’ with a capital letter throughout this study, so as not to confuse what is pertinent to the
Hawaiian Islands with other localisms. Also, this writing serves as a reminder that I am taking Local to be
an inclusive term, not one reserved for the Bamboo Ridge group or any other fraction of the whole of
Hawaii’s writers. When used as a mere geographical assignation, however, the word will not be capitalized.
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