IN SEARCH OF CHANGED CLIMATES

Abstract

In postcolonial studies, national and indigenous communities are often partly framed in relation to the relatively stable, enduring space of the land. As we move into more amphibious or aerial realms, however, questions about these frameworks emerge. Is there a space indicated by water and climate? Do the spaces of water and climate designate particular socialities (such as the nation), as the land often has? If any concept and practice of community requires some kind of permanence and stability, how are possible communities imaginatively linked to the disruptive but also cyclical temporalities of water and weather? In discussing these questions in this essay, I trace the shifting shapes and pathways of water and weather conditions in recent literature from Hawai‘i. I find that Gary Pak, in his short story ‘Language of the Geckos’, theorizes a history of trans-Pacific US economic and military expansion and marginalization of indigenous Hawaiian water regimes, as well as the emergence of a new kind of sociality among human and non-human characters, through tracing the movements and shifting shapes of water. I argue that it is through confronting the methodological problems that water presents for knowledge (specifically, issues of time and space) that Pak is able to build modes of propelling knowledge towards changed future possibilities of existence.

Keywords:

• ecocriticism
• Hawai’i
• Pacific
• Pak
• postcolonial
• water

Notes

¹Another, more recent, scholar of water, Christopher Connery, has also noted of European/American thinking that ‘Liquid is always the problem element – shapeless but not abstract; temporal; changeable’ (1996: 290). Michel Foucault's analysis of conceptual links between water and madness in European thinking also points us towards these imaginations of water as having refractive and unaccountable qualities (1988: 7–13).

²Susan Najita also notes the complexities of water in Pak's ‘The Watcher of Waipuna’ and in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, where she describes

rains as a ‘metaphor’ for resistance, standing in for the struggles of workers and of community activists (2006: 141; see also 142, 152). Pak's care with the intricacies of the rain in ‘Language of the Geckos’ also resonates with the many nuances to rain (and other weather conditions) in the Hawaiian language. Shawn Malia Kana‘iaupuni and Nolan Malone note that there are thousands of wind and rain names in Hawaiian (2006: 292).

³The definitions of the term ‘local’ are controversial and shifting in Hawai‘i: local status sometimes relies on a racial basis; how long one has been in Hawai‘i; working-class background, particularly in the context of the plantations; language, particularly use of Hawai‘i Creole English; or on types of actions, behaviours and codes (Kwon 1999: 6). ‘Local’ politics have sometimes had a problematic relationship with Hawaiian sovereignty struggles, perceived as subsuming indigenous claims to Hawai‘i.

⁴Reading Pacific and Caribbean literatures, Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2007) suggests in a similar way that water provokes a sense of transnational spaces, emphasizing the entanglements of land with the sea as a way to challenge ideas that islands are isolated and outside of history. Hugh Raffles also grapples with the complex communities and spaces of water in his discussion of the riverine environments of the Amazon: ‘It is by transgressing the conventions of human space that rivers reveal the poverty of scalar categories’ (2002: 181). These ‘immanently translocal’ ecologies always promise to be on their way to somewhere else (182).

⁵For extended readings of this story, see Najita (2006) and Kwon (1999).

⁶Helen Chapin (1996) also describes how, from 1861, Hawaiian newspapers articulated struggles for Hawaiian independence and sovereignty. In the late 1960s these nationalist papers ‘resurfaced’, forcing renewed discussions about Hawaiian sovereignty (4).