Kawai Strong Washburn, in his luminous debut, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, isn’t set in the stereotypical Hawai’i marketed by the tourism industry. It is set on the Hāmākua coast of the island of Hawai’i, or the “Big Island,” on land scarred by abandoned sugar cane plantations. It ventures into the sacred gulches where no roads go, where Hawaii’s power, or mana, exists in the land and legends known by the locals and by the land itself. It is a story told in the style of magical realism, but the meaning of magical realism in Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is worth noting because it serves as a kind of critique of magical realism as it is commonly employed and deployed. Traditional magical realism depicts its characters and the natural world as embodying magical qualities. Washburn’s magical realism does this, but offers a strong critique and a warning.
Washburn eventually takes us into the Honolulu of Kalihi, Hawai’i’s version of the “inner city.” The family cannot live in rural Hawai’i because all the jobs are gone. So, like many inner city kids, Dean, the eldest son of the Flores family wants to be a basketball star, and almost makes it. But, like so many men of color who live in the inner city, he eventually find himself in the prison industrial complex pipeline to nowhere. Kaui, the daughter of the family, studies hard and aspires to be an engineer, but even after leaving home for the mainland where she attends college, the gravitational force of the islands pull her back. And then there’s Nainoa, or Noa, the magical chosen son, who was rescued from the sea by sharks, who has the seemingly supernatural ability to heal people. He’s worshipped by his mother and father, to the detriment of his siblings…
Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is told in luminous magical realist prose, a language as poetic and rich as the prose of Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. But Washburn’s magical realism isn’t the naïve or innocent magical realism of Márquez or Morrison, who seamlessly interweave the supernatural into their tales and whose characters’ faith in the unknown spirit world often propels the story forward. Washburn gives us a skeptical magical realism, his characters themselves skeptical of the mystical, almost unable to touch it themselves, as disconnected from its power as the reader is.
To understand Washburn’s magical realism is to understand a little of the cultural history of Hawai’i, a land whose language and culture were almost entirely lost, only recently revived in the 1970s during the Hawaiian Renaissance. See the oldest of the oldest men and women walking down the street in Kalihi? If their roots go deep here, their grandparents were alive during a time when the Hawaiian monarchy was strong, when Iolani Palace was home to the actual monarchy, when newspapers were still published in Hawaiian, and where many local people still maintained a close connection to the land—to the food it could produce, to the fish in the sea, the water that poured down from the cloud forests where the gods resided.
To understand Washburn’s magical realism, you need to understand the cultural history of Hawai’i. It is a land whose rich pantheon of gods were supplanted by the one and only god of the missionaries, whose ancient songs and poems were erased when local Hawaiians were no longer permitted to learn their own language in school, let alone speak it. The children of Hawai’i are at once so close to the old ways—just a few generations removed—and are also as divided from the old ways as the children of refugees who have been forced to learn a new language and assimilate to a new culture in a faraway land. Today’s Hawai’i is imbued with American capitalism where private land ownership shapes the story of wealth as it unfolds. The process that led to the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy left many native Hawaiians and locals dispossessed of land and in poverty. Washburn writes about the aftermath: “It became like a prayer at our house, Our Father who art in debt collection, hallowed be thy pay.”
The subtle question that runs under the story is the question of who exactly capitalism serves. In old Hawai’i, before colonization, there was “no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth, a sense of one’s place in the system.” The story of the Flores family is a story of the ongoing toll of free-market unchecked capitalism on Hawai’i and its children. But the story is the same across the United States, too. Across our nation, poor and middle class children leave home, cut roots with their communities, and go into immense debt in the search of education and better jobs. The promise of that premise is seldom kept. The debt lingers, the jobs do not. Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors is the story that follows.
And so, Washburn’s magical realism is a late magical realism. It doesn’t have the innocence of Márquez or Morrison, who seamlessly interweave the supernatural into their tales and who find salvation in the supernatural. Washburn’s own characters are skeptical of the magic, as they must be. After all, Hawai’i is a land whose magic and mysticism has been commodified. The Flores children are at once aware of a time in the past when their culture was connected to the land and its mysteries, but are also dubious of its power. Dean is pragmatic; he understands that in a modern Hawai’i money is the only higher force that will save his family. Noa, the magical son with healing powers, is alone in his abilities, trying to convince his siblings that they have power, or mana, too. And so each child is isolated.
Children are the hope for the future, but some children become more than that in the eyes of their parents. For example, Malia, Noa’s mother, believes in her son to the point of fanatasism: “you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawai’i. The asphalt crushing kalo underfoot, the warships belching filth into the sea, the venomous run of haole money, California Texas Utah New York, until between the traffic jams and the beach-tent homeless camps and big-box chain stores nothing was the way it should have been. I believed that you could defeat this.” This is too much to put on a single person, especially a son.
Magical realism has had its own consequences on the White psyche. In Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers published an article with the provocative title: “A Superhuminazation Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks.” Prejudice takes on many forms, and some of its forms are not always “negative.” The authors note that “superhuminazation…contributes to prejudice towards Blacks despite appearing positive.” Superhumanization, in short, describes the conscious or unconscious belief that people of color have superpowers, are in touch with higher powers to which we do not have access, or are otherwise somehow “magical.”
Superhumanization, while the polar opposite of dehumanization, is just as problematic, as the authors argue that it can often be invoked by police when using excessive force, or by the culture as a whole that views Brown people as magical, which leads to Whites being less likely to empathize with people of color because they may believe that they have a greater capacity to withstand pain.
The superhumanization of Brown and Black people involves the “representation of others as possessing mental and physical qualities that are supernatural (transcending the laws of nature), extrasensory (transcending the bounds of normal human perception), and magical (influencing or manipulating the natural world through symbolic or ritualistic means).” Cultural depictions of people of color as somehow possessing magical qualities can contribute to these ongoing damaging stereotypes. Magical realism, as a form of literature, often contributes to these stereotypes. Noa is depicted in this manner.
And while Washburn’s magical realism could be subject to this critique for its treatment of Noa, Washburn’s magical realism is in fact a critique of these stereotypes. Noa, the “chosen” son, is not as all-powerful as his own family believes, and as we are initially led to assume. In fact, he proves to be the most vulnerable of the three children. The daughter scales cliffs, while Noa falls off one. Early on Kaui makes a plea for attention that foreshadows what is to come: “So yeah: Nainoa was becoming and Dean was becoming, and I was invisible besides. But I was still becoming, too. I was…there were all sorts of things inside me… and I felt more and more I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted it bad enough.” Kaui’s commentary is a critique of magical realism itself. She reminds us that her family’s story is important because her story is there, too, not because it is Noa’s mystical story. Washburn critiques Kaui’s invisibility in the early part of the book by elevating her importance by the story’s end. Most important of all, Kaui doesn’t have to be magical to be important.
Researchers in Social Psychology and Personality Science found that White people were more likely to associate people of color with words like “ghost” and “spirit.” While readers are tempted to be dazzled by the supernatural magical realism that surrounds Nainoa, a boy who can commune with animals in their final moments (in prose so beautiful Washburn brought me to tears), we lose track of the ordinary heroes of Hawai’i, the Kaui’s and the Deans, fighting just as hard to hold onto something even though the tide is against them.
Though Nainoa is viewed as the family’s “savior” because of his ability to heal, the three children represent three strong threads of Hawaiian culture. There’s Dean, who embodies the physical power of a warrior, but who becomes a basketball player. There’s Noa, who is a healer, carrying forth the ancient traditions of the lāʻau lapaʻau, a form of Hawaiian knowledge that weaves mysticism with a practical knowledge of plants and family systems. And then there’s Kaui, a practitioner of hula, who studies engineering and ultimately learns to work the earth itself.
This comes from the “voice” of Dean: “Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever, and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves… That’s me that first night in Spokane. For real I felt all the kings that came before me in a heavy way, like they was right inside my heart, like they was chanting through my blood… I was launching across the big gap of sky between Hawai’i and the mainland, seen the big grids of mainland city lights from the plane window, skyscrapers and highways that just kept going and going, all gold and white. For me they was just like those navigating stars for the original Hawaiians, pointing the direction to what’s mine.”
In the end, it is Dean who keeps his family afloat financially, by doing whatever it takes—a story so often repeated in black and brown communities where jobs and opportunities are scarce.
And Kaui’s ordinary realism has something much more powerful in it than Nainoa’s magical realism. Nainoa’s tragedy is the misapprehension of his own gifts. Kaui’s ordinary power resides in something real, but no less extraordinary—the power of poetry, the hula (“Listen, listen, listen. It’s not just a dance,”), and the power of her hands in the earth, a humble heroine of the meek and ordinary world, nevertheless healing Hawai’i in the only real way she knows how, from the ground up.
Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors will probably be the last authentic piece of magical realism that can be written, at least in our time. It should be required reading for anyone thinking of visiting Hawai’i. It should be required reading for anyone, period.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.