Seasonal Reads: This is Paradise

The weather outside is frightful. That’s it. I won’t linger on how cold it is here or how terrifying it was to walk around and see drunk SantaCon participants all weekend. What I realized in my comings and goings, between procrastinating final papers and thinking about spring semester, is that these are the weeks for reading. I offer you another seasonal read that will hopefully warm you (at least on the inside) and engage your brain at the same time. 

Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise takes the picturesque landscape of Hawaii—the beaches, the resorts, the exotic—and shifts the gaze from mainlander to local in her debut collection of short stories. This is Paradise is made up of six stories that, on the whole, follow native Hawaiians as they struggle with their quickly changing homeland. There’s a tale of heartbreak embedded in a cock-fighting revenge story, a sobering piece that centers on the way locals react to the death of a tourist, a tongue-in-cheek drinking game that expresses the nuances of Hawaiian funerals, and so much more. Each of Kahakauwila’s stories is gripping in its simplicity. The six pieces stand strongly independent of one another, but each helps paint the picture of a Hawaii that is as gritty and complicated as it is beautiful. 

Kahakauwila’s strengths lie in the restraint with which she writes, and her book of masterful prose is reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. The second story of the collection, “Wanle,” which is about cock-fighting, gender-roles, and dealing with loss (among other things) features a line that summarizes Kahakauwila’s style.

“I had my father’s way with words,” she writes, “which was to say, I didn’t consider them.” This line fills the book with the substance that a purely aesthetic collection of palm trees and surf wouldn’t be able to do. Kahakauwila knows when to embellish with an extended metaphor and when to withhold. This is Paradise also, more importantly, is a collection of stories that isn’t preoccupied with perspectives or stereotypes imposed by white or mainland Americans. Hawaiians are at the center of Kahakauwila’s narratives, and their struggles and hardships aren’t glamorized for outside gazes. There is no dictionary at the back of the book translating Hawaiian slang to standard English, no map of the islands that points out every town or city mentioned. This is Paradise invites readers to do that work on their own, which I think is especially important on these colder end-of-semester days.