A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

as their failure to integrate him into the community. A former rival confesses to having
cheated him for the woman they both loved. What emerges only in a private conversation,
though, is more directly related to their home valley: “Somebody tol’ me all dah land in
dis valley used to be [Jacob’s] family’s land, long time ago. Den da Cox family wen come
in and take dah land away from his family.” – “But what that got to do with us? I not
responsible. Dah haole wen do it. Not me.” 585 Fujikane identifies the stolen woman as a
metaphor displacing the stolen land, functioning to allay the community’s anxieties with
regard to their precarious foundation on someone else’s property. This displacement
enables the ending in which the smell disappears after the community has feasted on
substitute offerings of food, and has spent a night of unifying sexual encounters. In the
morning, “the warm air married with the cold dampness and thick clouds formed, and
soon, with the shift in the trades, rain began to fall over the silent, peaceful valley” (19).
The image of natural unity closes a “fantasmatic […] narrative of desire,” 586 which is,
however, troubled by evocations of the return of the repressed, and of contamination by
association:
the air became stagnant and more foul as if the valley were next to an ancient
cesspool that had suddenly ruptured after centuries of accumulation. The malodor
permeated the wood of the houses, it tainted the fresh clothes hung to dry, and it
entered the pores of everyone, making young and old smell bad even after a good
scrubbing (9).
The newly validated community is built on the bones of a dead man. Identity formation
grounded on contested space is problematic. Claiming the history of a place entails
having to account for the inequities and injustices inscribed in the place. Otherwise one
reproduces imperialist discourse.
In addition, Locals proclaiming Hawai’i their home cannot avoid the indigenous
conception of a reciprocal relationship with the land: The awareness of such a mandate
produces the responsibility to act accordingly if one wants to belong there. Thus the
supposed anger and curse of the dead Hawaiian man have to be read as metonymic for the
retaliation of the land itself. This correlates with what happens in several other stories in
The Watcher of Waipuna: In the title story, a flash flood, myriad frogs, and the caving in
585 Gary Pak, The Watcher of Waipuna, Honolulu 1992: 11.
586 Fujikane 1994: 13.
228