A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Moreover, and despite the aforementioned reservations, And the View from the
Shore remains the first and only book-length attempt at an inclusive literary history,
making visible continuity as well as innovation and the break with conventions in literary
works both about and from Hawai’i. As such, Sumida’s work has yet to be surpassed. The
most important aspect of the study for my project lies in its articulation of “the specific
textual/ideological and multicultural ingredients of what it means for the literature of
Hawaii to become and remain ‘authentically local,’” as Wilson has it. He notes that for
Sumida,
while recalling his pastoral roots in his family’s Aiea watercress farm, local means
a commitment to cultivate the agricultural/cultural ground of Hawaii in both
material and cultural senses: ‘You have to take care of the land because it supports
you. If you don’t the island turns into a dump for imported resources and there’s
no life. Culture is the same: The word implies planting, tending and nurturing.’ 282
Sumida’s attempt to define the ‘local’ shows the complexity and historical situatedness of
the term:
Race is partly at issue – but not exactly, not truly. A ‘local’ (meaning here a
certain kind of person) is usually thought of as nonwhite, for instance a native
Hawaiian, Asian American, Samoan, or Puerto Rican; or a local may be someone
historically, ethnically originating in the working classes of Hawaii, […] Most
hapa haole, ‘half whites,’ and other kinds of racially mixed ‘hapas’ are assumed
to be local. As I have tried to suggest, this involves far more than a racist
arithmetic of what fraction of this race, what fraction of that, an individual claims.
Rather, it concerns the rich complications and diverse tributaries of family and
ethnic histories that continue to course through the hapa individual and into the
generations to come, particularly in a local culture that values an elaborate yet
clearcut family history. 283
As can be gleaned from Sumida’s exposition, being Local involves a connection to the
place, its (plantation/working class) history, its languages, especially the plantation-
derived Hawai’i Creole English, and one’s ethnic roots. Drawing on the consolidation of
282 Wilson 1993: 120. ‘Aiea is a plain and city in central Oahu.
283 Sumida 1991: xiv-xv.
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