Here is the challenge: Which is which?? (hint, this is looking across the channel from Ka'anapali toward Lanai--answer at the end)
This is our last full day on the island. It has been a great vacation for me, not so much for Dad.
I am reading a book that I can only stand for a couple of chapters at a time. It was recommended to me by a lady at the Lahaina B&N, with the caveat that the locals swore by it and at it depending on their particular heritage. The book is The Last Aloha by Gaellen Quinn. Although it is historical fiction, it is much like Hawaii by Michener in recounting a very real piece of history not taught in school. (For those who smile, this one does NOT begin with the creation!)
Poor Dad has had to endure my frustration and outrage with the book. I have slammed it down and cried in anger at the story as it is depicted. I vow not to pick it up again, but the author writes so well and the story is compelling. I set it aside and read something else for a while. (I have finished Kate Jacobs' Knit the Season as fluff to decompress with, and I go to the Kindle for The Centurion's Wife, so that is a good thing.) But I have to return.
I want to quote one of the reviews to preface my problem with the book (well, not so much the book itself as the events it recounts):
" Some of the best accounts of Hawaii's past have come not from scholars, but from fiction writers, able to build on the historical records with acts of insight and imagination that bring them closer to the probable truths. Quinn's novel of Queen Lili'uokalani, is as empathetic and accurate a reconstruction of the downfall of the Hawaiian monarchy as it may be possible to get. Hawaiian readers, who already know so much of the queen's story, will be moved to see it once again so inexorably unfold. Other readers will have much to learn." --Elinor Langer, The Nation, April 28, 2008.
As I read this book (and I will finish it), I find myself furious at the shameful way the second generation New England missionary families conducted their not-quite-bloodless-coup in the name of sugar and greed. The intrigue, lies, deception, and bare-faced arrogance of these "Christian" businessmen drive me right up the wall. I know (as Dad reminds me) this has been over and done with for more than 125 years, but I wonder if we are not capable of doing the same type of things again, even to our own country. We ought to seek lessons from past mistakes, but if we never learn of those mistakes, we can never learn from them.
You have read Farewell to Manzanar and Snow Falling on Cedars, but do you realize that I had never heard of Japanese relocation camps in all my years growing up through California schools? I did not know they existed until you studied about them in school. We are very good at hiding our faults from ourselves and our children; but eventually what we do not acknowledge, we are doomed to trip over.
Okay, I guess I better dial it back a little. Calm, peaceful dialogue is preferable to bombastic rhetoric, no matter who is doing the talking. If anyone else happens to read this thought-provoking book, I would love to chat about it.
(answer--sunset on left, sunrise on right, both beautiful every day!)
2 comments:
I love you, and I know how you feel. It was the same way for me reading Empress Orchid, with how the british waged war on the Chinese empire because the chinese didn't want to produce opium anymore. It then followed through the utter downfall of that empire. It's always sad, but good, to read those kind of books.
It is definitely hard. We usually turn to the arts hoping to be reminded of the nobility of humanity, the generosity of spirit and capacity to overcome. The unfortunate downside is that, honestly, in order to even care about those types of honorable and enlivening traits there had to be something seemingly impossibly horrendous to overcome, to live with grace through, etc., in the first place. We may cherish the beauty we are capable of, but only because of the darkness that so often threatens to swallow it up. We're like Bede's sparrow in the hall: in the light and revelry for a moment as the chaos of winter threatens outside. Our best hope is just as you say, that we take a deep breath and learn of the terrible things that have been done in the past (and now) and approach the world and the future mindfully.
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