I’ve spent a few Christmases away from home in my lifetime. South
India in 1978, New Jersey (my old home) and Michigan (my wife’s) in the 80’s,
in the Yucatan in the 90’s and one in Chile in the —aughts (?). And now again
with the extended family in —Hawai’i. The Big Island.
It was unusual, to say the least, to spend Christmas Eve day walking
to the rim of a caldera to see a steaming volcano in the rain and then on to a
black sand beach and some swimming with sea turtles. Not the usual fare to
invoke Santa on his sleigh. And then Christmas itself off to a spectacular
waterfall and then time at yet another beach, with our own little private area.
We all have our fantasies of Hawaii, mine born from a Dennis the
Menace comic book, a Ricky Nelson song and the TV Show Hawaii 5-O. But the
roots of the tropical paradise myth go much deeper. Ever since Gauguin’s
evocative paintings of Tahiti, Europeans huddled around fireplaces coming in
from the London fog or the Vienna snow could dream of a perpetual sea, sand and
surf where warm-hearted scantily-clad “natives” plucked fruit from trees and lived
lives of leisure without banks, office hours, long hours spent in churches
atoning for sins.
On a mythological level, this is all good. Don’t we all dream of a
life of leisure, where food falls into our hands with a gentle pluck from a
tree, the sun is shining, the ocean refreshes us, people walk around scantily
clad—especially the young beautiful people shown in the postcards and movies?
The coconut palms wave gently in the ocean breeze, the twang of the slack key
guitar and plucked notes on the ukulele transport us to some magical
dreamworld, waterfalls are a short walk away and beautiful flowers decorate tables,
necklaces and more? In the modern post-Gauguin version, romance is in the air,
that moonlit walk on the beach, all before choosing the wallpaper, figuring out
who will drive the kids to soccer, dealing with the bills and waking up in the
morning thinking, “Hmm. He/she is still here.”
The London of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes. The Paris of Hemingway,
Stein, Picasso. The New York of the 30’s Savoy Ballroom or 40’s 52nd
St. The Rio of Black Orfeus. And weirdly in my childhood, the Hawaii of Dennis
the Menace figured into that. Mythical landscapes all, replete with associated
music and characters and character. Myth is what gives it all shape and color
and meaning, a place lived first in the imagination and then, if you’re lucky,
lived again when you finally step off the boat, train or plane. As a reader,
film buff, musician, poet, this all hits me where I most vibrantly live and
each time the myth is evoked, life gets just a few inches richer.
But I’m also painfully aware of the political realities behind the
myth-making, the colonial overpowering of native culture to make it a
playground for the privileged rich whites. Interestingly enough, I felt that tension
strongly my first time in Hawaii on the island of Kaua’i, but feel a whole
different vibe here on the Big Island of Hawai’I, where there is minimal
tourist overwhelm or surfer culture (at least around Hilo). We’re swimming at
beaches where the locals go and neither feel shunned nor treated like tourist
revenue.
Here I tiptoe to the dangerous precipice of the edge between
mythmaking and political correctness. I don’t wholly shun the latter term and when
it becomes a means to open people’s minds to others realities, wholly celebrate
it. But there is a line where everything gets judged through that lens and
the entire glory of much human artistic achievement gets tossed out because
people fell short in their time and place of where we feel they should be in
our time and place. Of course, cruelty and close-mindedness is never excusable
simply by “these were other times” and kindness and compassion are timely in
every century. I have no idea how to capture this complex matter other than
suggest that political realities are part of the whole picture and an important
part and myth-making and artistic dreaming is part of the whole picture and an
important part. If either shuts out the other, life is diminished. There needs
to be a conversation between the two and there is no formula for the proper
balance, time or place. Suffice it to say that while further investigating the
havoc wrought by Captain Cook, I still treasure the twang of slack key guitar
singing over the moonlit beach.
P.S. And yes, I still will listen to “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” But I
may switch which gender is singing which part.
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