A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

though in a Local (Asian/native) context it would be a fascinating focus that could supply
enough material to create another thesis.
Another interesting area of study could be the analysis of recent, sensitive and
informed outside representations of Hawai’i. An example would be Allegra Goodman’s
novel Paradise Park. In this exuberant spiritual bildungsroman, the heroine perceives the
Islands first from a touristic, if idiosyncratic, perspective:
In the airport there was slack key guitar music and such strong sweet scent of
flowers I thought at first that everyone was smoking weed. […] I couldn’t get over
it. The greens were so green, the blue sky so blue. The leaves, the clouds, even the
mock orange bushes. It was like everything on that island had just come out of the
wash; it was like the trees were hanging out to dry. I just wanted to ride around all
day. 612
Soon, however, she realizes the perversity of this voyeuristic position, seeing “that the
place wasn’t real to haoles at all. It was another Disneyland, as far as they were
concerned, and not an actual Land that belonged to a People” (48). For a while she
believes to have found her kind of “Eden” on a marijuana plantation in the fecund jungle
of Moloka’i (chapter 5), but reality draws her back into “Civilization” (chapter 6), where
a visit to the Paradise Park bird zoo sets her musing:
They lived in their giant aviaries in total harmony – since all their basic needs
were taken care of. But if the structure is imposed from the outside, how can a
place be a true utopia? A real paradise, that would have to come from inside the
birds themselves; that would come from their own hearts. A real paradise, that
would mean undergoing a paradigm shift in your very soul. And how can you
even begin to have a breakthrough when your forest canopy is all you have, and
you can never rise above it, due to the roof of your glorified cage? (75).
The bird is Goodman’s leitmotif, flying and singing the goals of her heroine. Texts like
Paradise Park attempt to benefit from the metaphors and ideas offered by Hawai’i
without the thoughtless or deliberate stereotyping and exploitation practiced by earlier
visiting writers. Perhaps we as readers and critics should take our cue from such an
approach. In more general terms, I wish for increased attention to and study of writing
612 Goodman 2001: 8-9.
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