A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so
longingly and beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done.
Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs
are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see
its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits
floating like islands above the cloud rack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the
plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
1. The Map’s Legend: Introduction
Mark Twain – ending a speech at a New York baseball dinner, April 8 th , 1889 1
In attempting to assist in the drawing of a new map of the world, the revised map of a
postmodern and postcolonial world, why not start at the far ends? Hawai’i is a good place
to begin if only for the reason that it seems so remote, so much more projection, fantasy,
paradise than a real place located firmly in the center of our earth’s vastest ocean. 2 The
North Pacific islands are a veritable ‘paradise lost,’ in need of mapping: In every
direction several thousand miles separate them from land, and already Mark Twain’s
famous statement that Hawai’i consists of “the loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored
in any ocean” indicates that this place may be adrift, moving, elusive: A fleet of ships can
weigh anchor any time, and sail out of sight or reach.
As the title of this study indicates, it intends to ‘map’ contemporary literature
from Hawai’i in English, taking the concept of mapping from Canadian literature,
especially from Aritha van Herk’s seminal essay “Mapping as Metaphor.” 3 Mapping
encompasses naming, representing, ordering, but also narrating, interpreting, ‘making’
sense. In a dictionary of Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, ‘mapping’ is defined as
“textualizing the spatial reality of the other, renaming, reinscription, allegorization.” 4 Van
1 Twain’s words have become famous and are quoted up to today by the Hawai’i Visitor’s Bureau. The first
one to quote and endorse this ‘dream of islands’ was Jack London in a 1916 Cosmopolitan article. Though
this sensuous overload may resound with a touristic vision of paradise, it is a fantasyscape devoid of people.
2 The proper, culturally sensitive spelling for Hawaiian words includes the ‘okina, or glottal stop (‘) and the
kahako, or macron, indicating an elongated vowel. This study employs the ‘okina, which does not apply to
anglicized words such as Hawaiian or Hawaii’s. Dictionary compilers Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert
reintroduced these pronunciation symbols in 1965, after the missionaries, in their reduction of the oral
Hawaiian language to a written alphabet, had simply ignored them. Unfortunately, my word processing
program cannot reproduce the macron.
3 Aritha van Herk, “Mapping as Metaphor,” Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien 1, 1982: 75-86.
4 Bill Ashcroft/Gareth Griffiths/Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, London 1998: 31-2.
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