A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

sweeter dreams, until its seed produces thumb-sized children. The fairy tale quality of this
final story carries the hidden seeds of very real concerns: Though coalitions may solve
many problems (such as halting development and setting historic imbalances right),
change itself is inevitable, stability and security are but an illusion. As Jiro well knows,
“nowdays, not like befo’ […] Not going be dah same” (171-2).
Some Local narratives, however, address none of the sociopolitical problems
elaborated upon, for their writers do not intend to claim Hawai’i in a cultural nationalist
sense. Are such texts Local anyway, or do they position themselves deliberately outside
this discourse of claiming and belonging? An example of a self-reflective take on
Hawaiian place and on change is John Heckathorn’s “Hanalei,” which was crafted in
1983 as an entry in the first annual Honolulu Magazine fiction contest. Heckathorn, who
by 1993 was to be Honolulu’s editor, remembers how he “dusted off the beginning of a
novel I’d started and abandoned. I stayed up late on hot sticky Kuli’ou’ou nights, swatting
swarming termites and pounding out draft after draft on a Smith-Corona portable.” 587 It is
no coincidence that he lets his narrator, a fiction writer, note about a rival, “not only, in
other words, was he almost infuriatingly perfect, but he also wrote stories, good tight little
stories in pidgin, that seemed to capture the life of these Islands in a way I never
could.” 588 The main focus of “Hanalei,” besides the urban protagonist’s irony-driven
consciousness, is on place:
You have to consider the setting. This is a story about Hawai’i, although you
might be excused for not noticing that till now. It is a story about Hawai’i because
that’s where I live, in Honolulu, and because that’s where I am at the moment, not
Honolulu, but the long white-sand beach of Hanalei Bay, about 30 feet from the
water. […] Hanalei has to be one of the great places on earth (93).
Although the following description of the place contains only facts, it recalls the excess of
Twain’s evocations of beauty and/or sublimity, if only by juxtaposition: While the latter
boasted when describing Kilauea caldera that he had “been to Vesuvius since,” the
narrator here confesses: “I haven’t been to the Greek Isles, or to the South of France, or to
Sri Lanka where the waves travel 6,000 miles from Antarctica without stop to crash onto
the beach” (93). Immediately, the lyrical elevation of Hanalei is countered by a pessimist
587 John Heckathorn, “Introduction,” in Chock/Lum 1999: 7-11, here 8.
588 John Heckathorn, “Hanalei,” in Chock/Lum 1999: 90-104, here 98.
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