"Locating the literature of Hawai‘i" in Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literatures. Ed. Bo G. Ekelund, Adnan Mahmutović and Helena Wulff. (original) (raw)

The air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I know it, the island, the voice of the island singing … the voice of our island singing. ' 1 So writes Maxine Hong Kingston in Hawai'i One Summer, a collection of personal essays recording the author's life during the summer of 1978. 2 Though the title seems to indicate a short sojourn on the isles, Kingston lived in Honolulu for nearly two decades. In the 'Preface to the Paperback Edition' , written in 1998, she recalls: 'I wrote these essays during the middle of our seventeen-year stay in Hawai'i. ' 3 Ever careful in her diction, Kingston does not call Hawai'i home. Relegating seventeen years to a 'stay' she implies that despite this length of time and being endowed a 'Living Treasure of Hawai'i' in 1980, 4 she was only ever a visitor. Kingston's trepidation around her status on the islands reflects how the literature of Hawai'i operates within a dichotomy of exclusion and inclusion. Questions of who gets to write this literature, where it is written, and what language it is written in, dominate debates that began in the mid-twentieth 4