A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

narrative. In Song of the Exile however, Davenport celebrates the community that means
home to the point of excess:
In that moment it seemed the moon fired a million silver drops into prismatic
lights that showered her, showered this narrow lane foaming with human rhythms.
A lane so narrow that, when someone sliced a Maui onion, across the road
someone cried. It seemed suddenly a mythic place, known only to a favored few, a
tiny kingdom whose people were given to dreaming, fabulating, where white
trumpet flowers hung like choruses of upside-down angels blowing jasmine and
ginger across their lives. Folks drifted in and out of yards, recalling ancient tribes
going forth to borrow fire. […] Until Pearl Harbor, until she saw their world in
flames, Malia had never understood that this narrow lane, so precious and
ephemeral, could disappear in a minute. Now she saw how each night was a
homecoming, like touching the roots of feeling. Here at dusk, folks stepped from
the working world into a kind of genesis. They who had seldom heard of unions,
Sundays off, or equal wages, put down lunch pails, took off slippers and shoes,
and stretched bare feet against soil that was regenerative and giving. Something
existed here so primordial, all that was human in Malia now responded (177-8).
From a native Hawaiian point of view, it is self-evident that the place is mythic, giving,
and primordial: Any place in the islands is built upon native space, layering the ‘aina
with inscriptions, roots vying for room. A society built upon the seizing of land and upon
its cultivation by segregated groups of many races naturally reacts by imagining spaces
that harbor functioning communities.
In Gary Pak’s 1992 magical realist short story collection The Watcher of
Waipuna, such ambiguous tales of place and belonging are negotiated. Pak’s stories are
influenced by legends and tall tales, incorporating history and mythology, mental
aberrations and spiritual manifestations. Another common factor is their focus on Local
communities and their precarious relationship to the space they inhabit. In her project on
competing nationalisms in Hawai’i, Candace Fujikane has analyzed the collection’s
initial story “The Valley of Dead Air” as an expression of the anxieties involved in a
Local cultural nationalist claiming of Hawai’i as homeland. For Fujikane, the story has to
be read against a socio-political background:
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