A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

A far cry from Kahoolawe, an experience I still struggled to convey on paper. Bud
probably didn’t realize how loud he was singing. Or didn’t care. ‘I’m a COOL
ROCKING DADDY in the US of A–.’ And he was. Unhindered, unaffected,
unassuming… strange. If America can produce guys like this, I thought, it can’t
be all bad. Kaeo, Bud, and I – and countless others, I guess – always found
ourselves wondering where being Hawaiian started and being American left off
and how the two blended and why they mixed like water and oil sometimes. 557
It is obvious that Morales knows first-hand about the impression a visit to Kaho’olawe
can make. One can assume some of his characters’ irony to be the author’s when he
writes about the United States Navy “bombing it for target practice (in case, Kaeo would
say, the United States ever got attacked by an island)” (87).
In November 2003, the Navy turned Kaho’olawe over to the State of Hawai’i;
plans for “trails, campsites and cultural education centers for visitors” are under way.
However, “a sizeable portion of the island will remain burdened by unexploded
ordnance.” 558
557 Morales 1988: 103. In his dissertation on native space, Houston Wood sees the PKO activism of the
1970s as “a central spark in the rebirth of interest in Hawaiian sovereignty. Many who went to Kaho’olawe
during that time were transformed, thinking of themselves as Americans upon arrival, but identifying
themselves as Hawaiian upon leaving” (Wood 1996: 129). Kaho’olawe appears again in another of
Morales’ stories, “Maka’s Lei Day.” Maka has gone there with his cousin Kaeo, and that is not the only
thing common to both stories: “It’s beautiful, Maka thought when they first landed. The charcoal-grey sand
sparkled even in daylight, and the island seemed completely unembellished by the trappings of civilization.
And the trees were…just wild. But that was the shoreline of Hakioawa. A mile west, along the rugged coast,
was Shipwreck’s Cove, a debris laden area filled with everything from smoothed glass and tennis balls to
beer cans and plastic jars and driftwood. And the further inland Maka hiked, the more he thought of himself
as a Marlow (or a Captain Willard) being led into the heart of some undecipherable darkness. But it wasn’t
Conrad or Coppola, or Africa or Vietnam” (167). For Maka, who grew up traveling the world with a
Hawaiian mother and a military father, the visit to the target island also stirs up defiance and a sense of
being Hawaiian. “Kahoolawe. Known to ancient Hawaiians as ‘Kohe Malamalama o Kanaloa.’ Missionaries
were appalled by the term ‘Kohe,’ which meant ‘vagina,’ failing to appreciate the implications of the total
phrase, the nurturing and enlightenment it suggested. […] You strip it of its true name, at least the one that
suggests more accurately its purpose, its function, its essence, then you can send the U.S. navy over to
bomb the hell out of it. Or into it. Phallic missiles sailing into wasted, indifferent vaginas” (168).
558 Timothy Hurley, “Target Isle Will Remain Risky,” in Honolulu Advertiser, 04/27/2002.
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