Fiji for the Fijians.

–George Speight

This recent anthology, edited by UH-Mänoa literature professors Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, should spark a lively local Kulturkampf. As a kind of textual halfway house, it embodies both the pluralist ideals of cosmopolitanism as well as some rigid nationalist orthodoxies. Diligent readers will be exercised … and rewarded.

On the one hand, they’ll discover refreshing counternarratives by native writers who play with colonial and indigenous languages – mixing freely whatever liberatory aspects obtain from either tradition – to re-envision anew their world.

On the other, the volume also counts as a brief for what might be called literary ethnic cleansing, a primer in the ideology of organicism whereby the native culture is inviolate, static, seamless, innocent – and stultifying in its European-derived conceits of superiority.

It’s clear, as the editors state, that a "new" Hawai‘i-Pacific is in the making – Wilson calls for an "oppositional regionalism in the Pacific," the emergence of a "Pacific local" writing, and "creative acts of resisting Pacific Orientalism." Whether this new realm will look like the "new Fiji" or the "new" Solomon Islands is an open question. Reflecting on Pacific post-colonial literature can – at least – alert us to the mission creep of cultural nationalism.

Jump to ground zero – the final post-colonial phase in which we’re now living. Italian historian Gramsci’s morbid symptoms abound; but that’s okay: Weird eruptions can be symbols of life and energy. They’re yeast for civil society.

Most of the anthology derives from papers presented at a Pacific writer’s conference in Honolulu in 1994. University of Hawai‘i Professor Haunani-Kay Trask contributes two pieces – a poetry reading she gave at the ’94 conference and a review/essay. Trask’s rhetorical style is, as always, equal parts attack and analysis. In the latter vein, she has insightful things to say about the creation of an oral, compositional literature and how Native Hawaiian composers such as Carlos Andrade are grounded in orature, oli, mele. Public performances provide the site for native artists to bond in an interactive meeting with audiences. Chants and songs, Trask notes, are based not on a Western individualistic form of creativity but on a functionally collective form. "Hawaiians write for other Hawaiians," she declares.

In the essay "Decolonizing Hawaiian Literature," Trask recycles her take-no-prisoners attitude by stressing the absolute distinction between Hawaiian literary and cultural production and the interethnic fusions celebrated by other Pacific writers. It’s an emphatic "No!" to sharing the title of "Hawaiian writer" with Asian and haole immigrant interlopers. As for those "local" writers who continue to live under the wrongheaded, naive assumption that they might humbly be a part of the "new" Hawaiian Pacific literature, they’re guilty of "theft of Native status."

For Trask, to be a Hawaiian or a Hawaiian writer, one must prove one’s genealogy, one’s blood. This is a matter of common sense, despite Trask’s almost paranoid belaboring of the point: "Here, an immigrant/settler consciousness is attempting to dispossess our Native people through the backdoor of identity theft," she argues.

But who is claiming to be Hawaiian who isn’t?

Trask snarls at local Asian writers for fixating on Hawai‘i’s plantation heritage – histories, she claims, few of them ever experienced themselves. Trask, with her hapa lineage (haole, Chinese, Hawaiian) and privileged status, might be culpable on the same front. Observe, dear reader, the low contests involved in asserting one’s victimhood – "the triumphalism of suffering," as Polish dissident Adam Michnik has it. Resorts to blood and belonging are surely the last resort of a bad conscience.

Halfway through this somber collection, an irreverent voice bursts through: Maori writer Alan Duff interviewed by co-editor Vilsoni Hereniko. Their exchange is a small masterpiece of polemic and raw human honesty. Thanks to the international cachet of the film Once Were Warriors (based on the popular columnist’s novel), Duff enjoys a high-profile, and money-making, status as a New Zealand celebrity. He isn’t about to be cowed by his post-colonial critics, whom he spoofs as politically correct Maori insiders who wear bone carvings and collect huge salaries at paheka (white) universities for dumping on Western culture in their classrooms, and see themselves as gatekeepers of native culture doing "gooey, gooey things" and celebrating "being brown."

Duff’s barbs are balanced by Australian journalist Cristina Thompson’s critical essay on Duff, in which she points out his seeming wholesale embrace of Western modernity and his crude trumpeting of unfettered entrepreneurialism. Thompson observes that Duff’s tough-love sermonizing to other Maori minimizes the pain still felt by many of his people and glosses over the enduring effects of historical suffering. But even Duff’s critics laud his gutsy "ethnographic accounts" (Thompson) and his warnings about the dangers of tribal aristocracy.

Where is Hawai‘i’s Alan Duff? Where is that rowdy "insider" who dares to disagree with our home-grown Native Hawaiian elites? Who will scandalize the priests of nationalist orthodoxies? Where is the artist who will pay her or his Native Hawaiian characters the ultimate artistic compliment by depicting them as complex, flawed beings like all humans, rather than static icons to be held in phony awe?

Or, where is Hawai‘i’s Sherman Alexie, the Native American novelist/filmmaker? Alexie’s work is full of satire and parody and humor. Nothing in Alexie’s work gets a writer’s pass – sacred culture, sweat-lodge revelations, buffalo-dung mysticism. Alexie can revel in his love for American pop culture and still be conscious of his native roots. And where is Hawai‘i’s post-colonial scholarly democrat, our Paul Gilroy, the black British scholar who exhorts other post-colonial subjects to renounce the specious category of race.

Island bumper stickers call for "Hawai‘i for Hawaiians." If we can resist "the great American Lie that [Hawaiians] have been exterminated" (Trask’s words), then we must equally resist the great nationalist Lie that non-natives and Native Hawaiians cannot co-exist, that it’s all or nothing. The tides of history have made sure that we do, in fact, co-exist. We must now overcome the paralysis of race worship that poisons us. The somber and provocative ideas contained in Inside Out are fuel for the burning dialogue that will take us away from literary apartheid.

[Writer's respond to this review at http://home.hawaii.rr.com/dougwords/NotHonWkly/001125response/response.html . This is a page from DougWords, http://home.hawaii.rr.com/dougwords/]