A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

at schools. 255 Such pervasive drawing of boundaries between kama’aina, i.e. those local-
born or at least Hawai’i residents since early childhood, and malihini, newcomers, is
reflected by Kingston’s feeling while attending the Talk Story Conference of being an
intruder: “I felt scolded, a Captain Cook of literature, plundering the islands for
metaphors, looting images, distorting the landscape with a mainland -a mainstream-
viewpoint.” 256 She however followed this statement with her conviction that literary
capability cannot be replaced by simple lifelong residence when writing about a place.
Kingston had been living in Hawai’i for several years in the 1970s as a high school
teacher.
The stories in the anthology are proudly presented as “documents to our people’s
history, both personal and collective,” 257 illuminating the “local experience” in some way
or other, while the poetry is highlighted as an ‘emerging’ art form, registering that “it has
been suggested that for those whose ethnic-linguistic roots are not English, poetry is a
more difficult kind of writing […] Perhaps, quite simply, local writers had no audience
and few places to publish, which continues to be the situation today.” 258 As for Local
drama, the predominant topics were inter-cultural or generational conflicts, the clash of
traditions, ethnicities, vernaculars, skin colors, and values, the interplay between bonding
and excluding, expressed exceptionally well by Peter Charlot in his play Three Feathers:
255 Frank Stewart/John Unterecker, Poetry Hawaii: A Contemporary Anthology, Honolulu 1979. The
“university branch of Hawaii’s literary activity,” as Sumida dubbed the group of academic writers who
formed the creative writing faculty, consisted of fiction writer William Huntsberry, poet Phyllis Hoge
Thompson, originator of the state’s Poets in the Schools program, and co-creator of the Hawai’i Literary
Arts Council together with Frank Stewart and the late poet John Unterecker. Sumida comments on HLAC:
“Seemingly, every member was a writer and a scholar or was aspiring to both” (Sumida 1991: 247). Since
1974 HLAC has annually bestowed the Hawai’i Award for Literature in association with the State
Foundation of Culture and the Arts (SFCA). Recipients have been, in chronological order, O.A. Bushnell,
Alfons Korn, Mary Pukui, Samuel Elbert, Leon Edel, Aldyth Morris, A. Grove Day, Gavan Daws, Marjorie
Sinclair, Maxine Hong Kingston, Katharine Luomala, John Unterecker, John Dominis Holt, W.S. Merwin,
Reuel Denney, Rubellite Kawena Johnson, Yoshiko Matsuda, Milton Murayama, Ian MacMillan, Cathy
Song, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Phyllis Hoge Thompson, Darrell H.Y. Lum, Erick Chock, Edward
Sakamoto, Leialoha Apo Perkins, and Tom Coffman. This list includes novelists, poets, playwrights,
historians, folklorists, and dictionary compilers, and brings together ‘approved’ Locals and those who spent
only parts of their lives in the islands. Their work has been anthologized in two showcase collections,
namely A Hawai’i Anthology (Honolulu 1997, ed. Joseph Stanton), and The Quietest Singing, (Honolulu
2000, ed. Joseph Stanton, Estelle Enoki and Darrell Lum).
256 Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawai’i One Summer, Honolulu 1998: 47. James Michener, at whom such
criticism could be leveled more justly, had been invited to participate in the conference, but declined (see
Sumida 1982: 140).
257 Chock et al. 1978: 11.
258 Ibid.: 65.
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