A Gift of Character
I’ve always had a problem with the abundance of nostalgia in local literature. Because we live in such a beautiful place, it’s so tempting to write about Hawaii when it was even more lovely—less people, more fish. We witness nostalgia in songs, books, and hear it from our elders all the time. In Hawaii, it’s part of the culture.
The cover of Mavis Hara’s An Offering of Rice doesn’t have people on it. Just a painting of big leaves and flowers, so when I picked it up, I was thinking, oh dear, here we go again.
However, once I read it, it became clear that this is a character-driven collection of poetry and prose, and anything nostalgic is incidental (and sometimes enjoyable—Tomoe Ame candy? Completely forgot that stuff existed). In one poem, a girl watches an octopus cling to life, and a colander, in a refrigerator. She cries. In “Chemotherapy,” a woman battles cancer. She doesn’t cry.
Mavis Hara’s book is a perfect example of how character should be the focus of story, not the number of papio you could catch in Kaneohe Bay thirty years ago. Once nostalgia takes over, and character gets lost in the midst of back-in-the-day revelry… I have no interest in reading it.
An Offering of Rice is a terrific book by a talented writer. It will make a fine gift.
December 13th, 2009 at 11:12 am
McKinney On “Character”
He does what he teaches, ergo, not just preaches. I appreciate Prof. McKinney’s personal perspective on character over nostalgia. My olde-tyme pacesetters Gessler and Blanding were so “Very Thirties,” led a milieu of purple Island writers, but even Don B. livened things up with real characterization when he described “The Virgin of Waikiki.”
Prof. McKinney is helping me to understand today’s milieu with his writing about contemporary folks around here. In one of his hottest, “Mililani Mauka” (2009) …Kai kisses a shaky Banyan, she’s shaky, too.
“You should lose the nose ring.”
“I should.”
…And all done in present tense, too…real today stuff in a Karaoke Bar. I’m studying and learning because he’s breaking ground, not sifting sand.