A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

ook’s title, in Shark Dialogues the sea is of central importance for the characters. None
of them is afraid of the water, for sharks are the family’s ‘aumakua, ancestral gods.
Throughout the generations, the women seek peace, solace, and healing in the ocean.
Grief, impending danger (as the foreseen attack on Pearl Harbor, 128), or loneliness
makes them turn makai, towards the sea. The description of Pono being transformed into
a shark after eating hallucinogenic seaweed is ambiguous enough to leave the reader to
decide whether he read about a drug trip or a real metamorphosis: First enjoying her
‘second nature,’ Pono then feels confined: “Nerves in the soles of remembered feet began
to cry for land.” Sliding “into a dream of waking,” she “looked down at her skin, and it
was gray, eerily marbling to brown, then golden, and it was rough like sandpaper, visibly
returning to petal softness. In her mouth there was blood and the taste of raw fish. […]
And, though she was in the world of humans, she was no longer wholly of that world”
(102). Also, both the family’s ancestress Kelonikoa, “stroking for her birth sands” (116),
and Pono and Duke choose their own death in the ocean (375-7).
In Song of the Exile, Keo’s passion for music is compared to his fundamental
connection with the sea, part of his home: “Some nights, […] he worked on the Steinway
till dawn. Then he walked down to the ocean. And he drank the sea he swam in,
nourished and submerged. For that quiet time, nothing mattered. He had his dream. He
had the sea. Wet peaks that soothed him, time untying him with salty hands” (15). Music
and the sea here are both carriers of wisdom, spaces in which human beings can
approximate the core of life. An almost broken Keo who lost and found his muse and
lover Sunny only to lose her again has made searching for her his purpose in life.
Returning from his ordeal as prisoner-of-war, he turns to the sea again.
Still frail and underweight, he stood thinking how, after this war, everthing would
be minor in comparison. Everything but the sea. How small humans seemed,
going up against its waves. He listened to its symphonic clashes, the slow
excursions into fugues as waves fell down exhausted, lounging into ballads. Then
preaching, bluesy ruminations of the tide receding. In that moment something in
him reached out to his broken self, that searcher looking for the perfect note, the
magic combination. The young man who had once breathed music, swam it like
an amphibian (193-4).
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