Book Reviews

THIS IS HOW HAWAII GOT THAT WAY

Residents of the state of Hawaii and particularly of Oahu will pro bably get a great deal more out of Ka’a’awa, a novel by O. A. Bushnell, khan those more orientated to the South Pacific Islands. But even for the latter this book, almost instant ■classic that it is, is well worthwhile, j Oahu in the 1850 s, the period in which the novel is set, was a great deal more like the rest of Polynesia than Oahu is in 1973, nonetheless Changes, since its discovery by Euro peans only about 75 years before, pad been devastating. This sudden impact cf western ideas on a Poly nesian culture and the apparent in ability of anybody to do anything |bout it, is the dominant theme of the story.

I When it opens, Kamehameha 111 b King of all Hrwaii and his mana is still considerable. However, he lasn’t much idea of what is going on just over the mountains from Ins beach house at Waiki A. He therefore summons to him a Hawaiian rank, Hiram Nihoa, who has hade the transition from the old to lie rew ways insofar as he is a tccessful Honrlu'u me chant and he owner of waterfront bro hels iuphemistically called hotels. Nihca F sent on a journey over th" pali and hou'd eastern Oahu as the King’s Py ; to fi-d ou* whether American filibusters” from California intend o invade the Hawaiian islands and overthrow the monarchy.

Nihoa finds no sign cf filibusters >r their evil intent but he finds a heat deal that is wrong with the )ahu countryside and Hawaiians, ►itf fully reduced in numbers, living n s ualor and poverty, some almost >n the verge of starvation, plundered •y the King’s h*lf sister so that she N her latest lover might live in ale-ess. the way Nihoa befriends Ji orphan the last of his line and ae boy, Eahou, becomes the central paracter of the story as a battle is Jaged to save his life, first from

the white man’s influenza and then his smallpox.

Nihoa completes his journey and his story that makes up the first part of the book. Part II is the version of Saul Bristol, an American with a Puritan guilt-complex that turns him into a virtual recluse.

The orphan boy, Eahou, is the connecting link between Nihoa’s story and Bristol’s and the reason why these two dissimilar characters begin to work together to try to cushion the Hawaiian against the worst effects of the new way of life.

It is Nihoa, however, who is the hard-headed pragmatist, the profes sing Christian who lives on the proceeds of his whore houses and confesses to 23 children, most of them illegitimate; and Bristol who does most of the agonising, about his own sins and the state of the country as a wh°le.

After the smallpox epidemic he says; “In my opinion, the number of deaths was twice the official figure.

The nation can spare non" of them and it will never recover from their loss, tri 1778, when foreigners dis covered these islands, about 200,000 people lived upon them in health

and comfort, if not in a state of grace. Now, as I write, fewer than 70,000 Hawaiians remain. At this rate, the last Hawaiian will have dis appeared from the face of the earth before this splendid century ends.”

At about the same time, on his way to see the King, Nihoa was saying something of the same sort; “No doubt at one time, when Honolulu did not exist, before these foreigners came in the sailing ships and found the harbour of Kou for an anchorage, perhaps then this Waikiki was an important place, the home of Oahu’s kings. But now, with half of Oahu’s people dead in their graves, with almost all the surviving half clustered around the wharves and warehouses, the grogshops and whorehouses of Honolulu, Waikiki too is dead. It will never amount to anything. A breeding place for mosquitoes and frogs and rats it may be, but of no use to people.”

Nihoa is a much more human character than Bristol but the way things have turned out in the 20th century he was dead wrong about Waikiki, and Bristol entirely right about the last Hawaiian.

In the 19th century most of the Pacific Islands went through the same devastating clash of cultures and depopulation as the islands of Hawaii.

All finally recovered hut Hawaii was overwhelmed. According to the latest census, about 140,000 citizens of the State of Hawaii, out of 720,000, have some Hawaiian blood but the number of pure-blood Hawaiians is negligible.

In spite of its theme this is an entertaining and, at times, amusing story which can be real for its message or without it. The author was born in Hawaii and until he retired in 1970 was Professor of medical microbiolopy at the Univer sity of Hawaii. He has had published two other novels, also about Hawaii.

Judy Tudor.

(KA’A’AWA. Published by the Univer sity Press of Hawaii for the Friends of the Library of Hawaii. SUSIO.)