Musings: Sound Familiar?

I woke up this morning to sparkle: sun squinting through thick clouds, catching the rain still clinging to leaves, setting them to twinkling. It called to us, so Koko and I went out walking in that sparkling, shimmering world, watching leaves blowing horizontally, hearing the steady drip of drops cascading from sighing trees.

In the distance, Kalepa and Haupu were enshrouded in the remnants of a shower, while closer at hand, a lychee tree hung heavy with red fruit. Clouds darkened on the northeast coast, moved mauka and hovered, hurrying us along, and we returned to the house just as a squall spattered on the skylights.

It’s a nice morning for cozying in with a book. I’ve been re-reading Doris Lessing’s short stories lately, the ones set in colonial Africa, and I’m seeing more than a few parallels between the creation of plantations in Africa and in Hawaii, the thoughts of her protagonists and the ones often expressed in the comments section of this blog.

Her characters, the whites who came to make their fortune and considered themselves self-made men, even though they depended almost entirely on the labors and knowledge of their workers, set themselves apart, living in spacious, cool homes surrounded by well-watered lawns and gardens, while their workers were crowded into hot, dusty villages. But that was OK, they told themselves, because that’s how the natives liked to live, they were accustomed to squalor; why, look at the rubbish they allowed to pile up, their broods of children spilling out of unkempt huts.

Besides, they reasoned, if you gave them anything nice, they wouldn’t appreciate it, anyway, or they’d sell it for far too cheap, or even give it away, unaware, in their childlike simplicity, of its true value.

The natives’ rituals and spiritual beliefs, though grounded in countless centuries of intimate interactions with their natural world, were viewed as total bunk, baseless superstitions held by primitive people, quaint and outdated in a modern world that could explain everything through Christianity and science. The natives were to be pitied, educated and converted, and if they resisted, whipped, if necessary, to keep them from clinging to their past, which inevitably clashed with something the plantation owners wanted for their future.

Through it all ran the uneasy tension created when natives, displaced from their traditional lands and way of life, were forced into working relationships they didn’t really want, but needed now to survive, with people who disdained, feared yet also needed them. Lessing's white “landowners” often grapple with how much force they can exert to maintain dominance, without risking revolt, sabotage, abandonment or violence from their workers.

Lessing even delves into the development of the land, the real estate agents who sell people on the dream of creating their dream from raw land, the once wild places that no one ever thought would get built up, the steady disappearance of animals, the diversion of water, the often grotesque manipulation of the landscape into something that resembles "back home."

And through it all are woven the attitudes of entitlement, arrogance, intolerance, charity with strings attached, the sense that the natives are lucky that the Europeans arrived and gave them opportunities to correct their false beliefs, make money, succeed, coupled with frustration and fury when the natives just can’t seem to get with the program and grasp what’s good for them.

Sound familiar?

Anyway, the conflict created on Kauai by the ongoing expression of such colonially-based beliefs, and the ongoing resistance to them, is also explored in my piece “Parallel Universes,” which was originally printed in “Bamboo Ridge” and today is excerpted on the editorial pages of The Honolulu Advertiser.

Just to give you a flavor, here are a few of the dialogue bits that weren’t included in the Advertiser:

“The complainers from Dana Point, the rich fuckers, that’s the ones coming to my neighborhood. They build fences on other people’s property — it’s not the local way. They put up fences; it’s like being in jail. I never grew up with fences. The beaches were always open. The new people, they just like complain. Alla them, they major complainers. They sit in traffic — yellow, green, red — they never realize the real Hawaii is just four blocks away. They don’t go to their friends’ houses, or parties or one baby luau. ‘Cause they don’t know nobody. Their cars get the heavy tint, windows always rolled up. They don’t talk to us. They make like the locals stupid. I watch them get sucked in, and I watch them get sucked out. I only look like one monkey. I see what’s going on.”
***
“Hey, everybody has had changes to their culture. Look at the Indians, all the immigrants. But how long are you gonna cry about it? After a while, you just can’t feel any sympathy for these people. It’s like, give it up and move on already. We can’t be compensating people for every little thing they think they lost. We don’t have that kind of money.”
***
“I paddle out at Pine Trees and this haole guy says, ‘Welcome! Where are you from?’ and I say, ‘Where are you from?’ And he goes ‘Hanalei.’ And I say, ‘No, I’m from Hanalei. Where you really from?’ And he says ‘California.’ And I say, ‘Don’t they have waves there?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah.’ And I say, ‘So why don’t you go surf ‘em?’”
***
"We all love Kauai. We don’t want it to change, either. We all enjoy the Hawaiian lifestyle and culture. It’s what we moved here for — the watersports, the surf, the weather, the golf. In fact, I had this little sign made for my desk, and when I’m talking to customers, I turn it around and show it to them and it says: ‘I don’t sell real estate, I sell a lifestyle.’ I made that up myself. I think it pretty much sums it up. Don’t you?”