A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

to our young Pacific writers: that they have too much to draw on to waste their
time on bootless angers, fruitless angers. […] There is a rich, wonderful,
multicultural heritage we have now in Hawaii where democracy really works. It’s
the one shining example in the world to me where different cultures mix and work
and it works. 608
In the Hawaiian Islands, traditions, cultures, beliefs, and perceptions clash, not just
between ethnicities, but also between generations, classes, and genders. This has entailed
friction, inequality, division. At the same time, there has always been a strong sense of
community, reciprocity, and peer grouping. In recent decades, though anger and
frustration still have their place, in writing as in daily interaction, fusion, blending,
mongrelization, and hybridity have been on the rise. It is a blessing to be hapa of some
kind, to live, cook, pray, or socialize hapa, think hapa, and stick together in a common
concern: to preserve the Local, live aloha, fight levelization and the Disneyland quality
that mass tourism has been fostering. Facing the possibility of legalized gambling in the
Islands, Honolulu Advertiser writer Jerry Burris asks:
What kind of a visitor destination do we wish to be? Disney and Las Vegas (even
without gambling) have redefined what it means to be a tourist destination. They
are the products of imagination and fantasy, not reality. While a fair amount of
myth-making went into the building of Hawai’i’s reputation, it is built on reality:
The reality of a natural environment that is second-to-none and a cultural
experience that is ours alone. 609
Finally, from a perspective of literary scholarship, one can argue with Candace Fujikane:
“The peculiar crisis of Hawaii, where multiple anticolonial nationalisms compete with
and engage one another, offers us the opportunity to complicate and extend postcolonial
theories that focus solely on a binary relationship between imperial nation and
anticolonial nationalism.” 610
608 Kneubuhl 1997: 266.
609 Quoted from Honolulu Advertiser, 01/20/2002.
610 Fujikane 1994: 3.
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