A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

turn of the caterpillar track wrench a spirit out of the soil, demanding more time, laying
true claim to this, their place” (61). In this haunting story, the place and its original
inhabitants have claimed a person who had not known his place in an environment and a
culture that is layered and refracted with incongruities. Stories like this reflect the
corresponding actual need to unearth what is buried under foreign impositions and
colonialist inscriptions, to recover the original and historical meanings of native spaces.
At the same time, indigenous conceptions of the sacredness of certain places, and the
illegitimacy of their development by non-native interest groups, are negotiated.
In his 1996 dissertation on the “rhetorical production of Hawai’i,” Houston Wood
refutes charges recurrently leveled at native Hawaiians (and other indigenous people) of
the modern “construction of culture,” or the “invention of tradition:”
I accept the notion that remnants from pre-contact days can still be found in
Hawai’i today even though Homi Bhabha and some other influential Euro-
American critics argue that contemporary indigenous cultures are so thoroughly
hybridized that all appeals to pre-contact values should be viewed as romanticized
fantasies. 546
Wood identifies a Hawaiian “polyrhetoric” as the generator of alternative epistemologies.
Quoting from Kanahele’s Ku Kanaka, he defines this rhetoric as an intellectual freedom
that “seems to be very much part of the logic of polytheism.” 547 Invoking Deleuze and
Guattari, he goes on to argue that such a rhizomatic polyrhetoric is indigenous to Hawai’i:
In Hawaiian cosmology, the indigenous people were born of the same mythical parents as
the kalo, or taro plant.
Kalo, of course, is a rhizome, and, like other rhizomes, grows without producing
seeds by sending out shoots and roots, often under or across the surface of the
ground. Cultivation of kalo offers continual reminders of the connectedness of
present plants to earlier plants, and of those earlier plants to the first kalo plant,
elder brother to the Hawaiian people themselves. […] To be a member of an
‘ohana is then to be a node on the open-ended rhizomatic growth that both gives
birth to and feeds each person. 548
546 Houston Wood, Displacing Native Places: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai’i, Honolulu 1996: 9.
547 Wood 1996: 137. For an inspired analysis of the assumed native polyrhetoric, see ibid. 124-51.
548 Ibid.: 146.
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