A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

strategy will be employed to analyze the texts from Hawai’i in order to make their
postcoloniality visible.
Perhaps it is not so much that Pacific peoples are glossing over differences in an undiscriminating
valorization of precolonial and colonial strata of their past as that Pacific peoples are more accepting of
2.2.1 Hybridization
both indigenous and exogenous elements as constituting their culture.
Margaret Jolly – “Specters of Inauthenticity” 65
It is difficult to maintain clear-cut boundaries between actual writers working in Hawai’i,
which is due to the miscegenation as well as the cultural hybridization that took place
since Hawaii’s Polynesian inhabitants first came into contact with others. Hyphenated
identities and self-proclaimed ‘Hawaiians at heart’ abound. Yet each group seems to be
on its own quest instead of trying to find a common Hawaiian, a Local ground to start
from. And the fractions tend to align themselves with foreign movements instead of with
their fellow Locals: Asian Americans with mainland Asian Americans, native Hawaiians
with pan-Pacific groups or Maori. But every Local writer who employs Pidgin rather than
Standard English, Hawaiian, or any other possible language, implicitly acknowledges this
precarious common ground, for Pidgin arose out of Hawaii’s multiethnic plantation
history, and is spoken and written as a token of a shared history to which each of these
groups contributed something. The very lexicon of Hawaiian Creole English bears
witness to this coming together of linguistic and cultural differences. The attempt to
narrate the islands’ reality must inevitably lead to the realization that there is no pure
Hawai’i.
The bilingual Canadian poet Lola Lemire Tostevin chooses the metaphor of
“contamination as a literary device,” elaborating that “contamination means differences
have been brought together so they make contact.” 66 A positive view of contamination
65 Margaret Jolly, “Specters of Inauthenticity,” in David Hanlon/Geoffrey White (eds.), Voyaging through
the Contemporary Pacific, New York 2000: 274-297, here 278.
66 Quoted by Diana Brydon, “The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy,” in Ian
Adam/Helen Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, New
York 1991: 191-203, here 191.
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