“Another day in paradise” is often said in Hawaii. But what is this notion beyond nature--the wonderful weather, waterfalls, spectacular beaches with soft sand and clear blue water, waves breaking or the rainbows? If paradise always exists, it is non-temporal and as such where is history of the very real people who lived here? I think some of us who relocate to the islands because of our own free will, consider all of the outdoor activities available to us year round as a sort of return to childhood innocence and play. At the ugliest end of that spectrum is the persistence of noble savage philosophy and infantilization of the indigenous culture by the newcomers, at its most benign but still problematic end an attempt at recapturing the past or the present by playing at something new. In the biblical tradition, we were innocent in paradise because we did not know death. When we liken our everyday to paradise, that innocence might mean willful ignorance.
A return to our own personal nostalgic past is often a return to the past of the nation as a political system, the cultural nostalgic past. What we are drawn to in our past--our idealized notion of the past--is the past that no longer exists. Thus we might be awashed with feeling of emptiness, of nothingness because although we understand the substance of the past we are after, its physicality is inaccessible. The time of the past can only exist through us in the time of the moment. Immigrants or self-imposed exiles speak of a better future as those who know what exactly the past they control through their narratives holds. Through linguistic connections of ideas we negotiate relations between the past and the present and sometimes new perspectives of understanding are necessary to rework the past, to envision a new future.
Growing up, Polish history was the history of suffering and perseverance. In the final years of communism, Polish romanticism and its Catholic bedfellow joined forces in resistance and defining Polishness. The romantic literature was full of messianic elements, communings of spirits with the world of the living and ancestor worship. Most of the veneration was directed as a form of respect to those who died in the struggle for nationhood. The symbolism of insurrectionary failures after the death of the nation (partitions at the hands of foreign powers), its rebirth and then the struggle against the totalitarian incarnation of evil--all of it was imprinted on my childhood imagination. I felt the heaviness of my native city, Krakow, but it was only in the later study of its history that I understood how deep its ties to the cult of the fallen hero were. In the performative realm already at the beginning of the 1800s, elaborate recreations of funerals of heros of the napoleonic era were staged and such events became the specialty of the city in the 19th century.
My childhood, suffused with stories of ritual and fantasy and struggle, comes back to haunt in the Hawaiian islands as I discover unknown to me spirits of this land. The now escapes me often, moving backward or forward on the continuum of consciousness and my speech strains to stay in the present, modulated by memory just like all objects around us. What was once intimate and familiar though, the past of Krakow and Polish history still present in memory, is now strange. What I want to negotiate through my language today is a search for a better tomorrow here, a frontier of justice and human goodness beyond the language of aloha--a true understanding on how our speech on paradise interacts with the reality of living in Hawaii. To that end, hard questions have to be asked of history of the islands and its participants, the horrors and dreams gone by.