The Islands

So, I am sitting in my hotel room in Honolulu. The windows are shut, air con on. I am wearing a hotel robe, munching on dried seaweed, responding to portfolios. My luggage is back on Kona, though I am on Oahu. My driver's license is back at the Macy's in Sherman Oaks, though I fortunately had my passport. My credit card is also at that Macy's, but that's okay, because a few days earlier, someone in Canada stole it and began their lifelong dream of committing fraud to shop at Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Oh, and my luggage is on Kona because the plane taking me from LA to Honolulu blew an engine in the middle of the ocean and so had to chug it's way to the nearest stop (sorry, Kona!).

It's been a day.

But it's my first time in Hawaii. As I like to tell friends/family/random people, it's one of the five states I have left to visit. It's also a state that has moved across my imagination from time to time in various and oddly juxtaposed ways: most of my immediate family has been here (without me), which is a bit of a twist; the fourth chapter of my dissertation focuses on a text (Juliana Spahr's The The Transformation) that is partially set here; Dog the Bounty Hunter took place here. I'm not even joking about that last one - what shows like Dog and Storage Wars and Parking Wars all have in common (for me) is that they show how the "reality" of a place is far more than it's postcard promise. It's the same pleasure I get from crime novels: these are what the streets actually look like, these are how the people actually live, this is what it means to actually survive. All kinds of texts give us that "actually," but not all occur on places that are seemingly so at odds with the mundanity presented. Storage Wars in California is interesting, but in Texas, not so much. And Dog the Bounty Hunter fell flat when he went on the hunt in Colorado, but in Hawaii, I was intrigued.

So, now that I am in Hawaii, I have that so-called realism echoing around the back of my head (the meth, the repeat drug offenses, the glimpse of indigenous people living and working and navigating the complex colonial history of Hawaii as it plays out in tourism and drugs and poverty) combined with Spahr's own haole anxieties about academia's (and language's) colonizing force combined with my family's simple, nostalgic love for what truly is a beautiful, foreign and familiar place (and which, of course, is not without its own colonizing effect).

In her essay "In the Islands" from her collection The White Album, Joan Didion talks about coming to Hawaii with her husband in lieu of getting divorced. They stay at The Royal Hawaiian and she looks at the other rich people (the people "like her") feeling disconnected from them and herself. She then gives an account of the hotels history before moving onto a discussion of a cemetery for the dead from first WWII and then Vietnam. The essay, though, is really about how people own places through language, how certain places are forever associated with the writer who gave them life (she lists Hemingway, and Faulkner, and, in reference to Hawaii, James Jones).

I think she's right, in her way, because many of us do associate places with writings about them. One of my favorite habits is to read a crime novel in the place I am visiting. I like the kind of ownership those books display about a local place and that I can then vicariously feel. But I also think Didion's "being right" is also what makes Spahr and even Dog (the show) "right" - Hawaii is a place taken over (for me and for, I would imagine, most of its visitors) by all the forces that have permeated it over the last century, so much so that the only reference to native Hawaiians I encountered today was in the numerous complaints people made about the difficulty in pronouncing the street names.