A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Hawai’i can in fact appear as pre-lapsarian spaces. Genealogy supplies a motherland,
while autobiography endows life with a coherent ‘path.’ History has ‘taken place’
somewhere. Ethnicity can signify ‘home’ in various ways. Traditions, religions, values,
and ethnic foods may provide a space to inhabit, which does not have to be the ‘melting
pot.’ Reduced to behavioral cliché or skin color, ethnicity can become a prison without
escape. One can be ‘at home’ in one’s language(s), or, as Lois-Ann Yamanaka has said,
“linguistic identity being skin and flesh to my body.” 603 Thus, Pidgin can become “Like
refuge / Pu’uhonua, / from the City,” 604 or can create the safe home ground of the peer
group that Locals may be.
Though literary texts are situated in the world, they do not reproduce reality. The
space of Local literature does not equal the real place Hawai’i, a cluster of islands
surrounded and cradled by the Pacific Ocean, layered with inscriptions of nature and
culture(s). Rather, Hawaii’s writers have created fictions, “imaginary homelands, Indias
of the mind.” 605 However, as is the nature of literature, these fictions might very often be
“‘truer’ than the facts.” 606 Local identity is imprinted with loss, and accompanied by gaps,
contradictions, and silent parts. First, literary texts can attempt to fill in, reconciliate, and
give voice, recreating a paradise of coherence and security, always in danger of glossing
over injuries and inequities. Increasingly, Local writing foregrounds the elusiveness and
ambiguity of ‘home,’ the slippage of self and other, and the insecurity of living in a
complex and non-edenic world, even in Hawai’i, the alleged ‘Paradise of the Pacific.’
However, amidst all the wariness and skepticism, there are always instances in which the
desired wholeness and harmony – “that heaven, the Hawaiki, where our hearts will find
meaning,” as Albert Wendt said 607 – can be glimpsed or felt. These are as diverse as
remembrance, ethnic holidays and traditions, finding the right words, experiences of
community, a dive under water, a walk on just-hardened lava: little islands of certainty in
a sea of doubt. The late playwright John Kneubuhl once said:
One of my last missionary things – before angels come and go with me to Hell,
because I prefer the society there than in the other place – is to try to get this over
603 Shea 1998: 32. See also footnote # 500 on page 190 of this study.
604 Kahanu in Chock/Lum 1986: 43. See also footnote # 497 on p. 189.
605 Rushdie 1991: 10. See also footnote # 74 on p. 24.
606 Kneubuhl 1997: 257.
607 Wendt 1976: 49. See also footnote # 160 on p. 48.
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