Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Unfamiliar Fishes
Sarah Vowell's story of the Americanization of Hawaii.
I like how Sarah Vowell writes history. She does her research (which includes the touristy experience), mulls it over, absorbs it, then rolls out what she's learned in an anecdotal style - including digressions, centered in first person. You rarely get the impression she's referring to a stack of index cards. She provides a brief bibliography but no index or footnotes. It's the kind of writing that wins you an A+ in high school English & sometimes History, but in college you usually get away with it only in Creative Writing. It does count for something with me that she majored in Modern Languages at Montana State.
The virtues of Unfamiliar Fishes are the virtues of all Vowell's books & essays: Intelligence; dogged research; biting wit; the courage to confront the ugliness & horrific violence of American history, particularly with regard to our mash-up of the protestant imperative to evangelize & the capitalist imperative to exploit (a national psychosis that plagues us still) & how these are uniquely allied in our history in both chattel slavery & manifest destiny. Our deadly march across the continent made the British Raj in India look benign by comparison.
Her drollness (which may be a character flaw harnessed as an asset, who can tell? ) & inability to overlook an irony (Is anything not ironic in American history?) wears on me after awhile. Fortunately, her books are brief. A coffeehouse date with her is sufficient, & when she's a guest on Letterman, I don't find myself wishing Sarah had a third segment; only that Dave would let her finish a complete thought & give her a chance to sell her book.
Unfamiliar Fishes, although a history of Hawaii after Europeans found it, feels like an extended appendage to The Wordy Shipmates. It follows a small bunch of New England protestant missionaries - elite descendants of those shipmates - to Hawaii where they, in unwilling concert with New England whalers, set in motion the terrible energies that destroyed indigenous Hawaiian culture with religion, disease, & good old capitalism, & basically conquered Hawaii from within, like the infectious diseases we brought to the islands that reduced the native population from an estimated 300,000 to 40,000 in a few decades.
The Great Irony for me is that Hawaii had produced a tyrant-king, Kamehameha I, before the missionaries arrived, whose bloody unification of the islands (thanks to the introduction of cannon & muskets) & whose son's subsequent destruction of the old religious order, priestly caste, & taboos had made it easier for missionaries to infest the place. Like the Sioux when they became a buffalo-hunting horse culture, Hawaiians had to re-imagine their history & origins when Kamehameha I took over. Sarah does not idealize Hawaiian culture. Rather, she makes clear that the Hawaiian Islands group had embarked on its own messy path to nationhood & development of a common identity, which was tragically foiled - as history tells us too-commonly occurred - by foreign imperialists.
I found myself putting the book aside, picking it up, & rushing through the last quarter of Unfamiliar Fishes. This happens often enough with overlong novels, but Vowell writes a companionable sort of prose in which the author is almost as much the subject as the ... subject. A few possible reasons: Pasty-faced Sarah in Hawaii is a bit like Santa Claus versus the Martians. She loves Hawaii. But everyone loves Hawaii whether or not we've been there. Authentic old Hawaiian culture is not only really alien to western culture, it's far more unfamiliar & exotic to us mainland Yurrupean-Americans than the Native American cultures of North America we conquered nation-by-nation & tribe-by-tribe over 300 years. Vowell's juxtaposition of humor & horror didn't work for me the way it did in The Wordy Shipmates. The Puritan colonist shipmates really were my ancestors on my mom's side. But by the 1890's there were serious, vocal dissenters to America's expansionist designs, including Mark Twain. One can imagine siding with Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch. I thought, maybe it's just me, that I can't accept the limitations of the book. I concluded that was not the situation. Sarah tried to cram way too much information into a 238 page book. She had to give us three back stories: The Hawaiians', the missionaries', & the discovery of Hawaii by Europeans. She had to tell us how America annexed Hawaii. & she had to provide a travelogue, a sort of tourist's guide to the popular & obscure attractions, geological & historical. So she flits all over the place, from island to island, past to present, with her precocious & annoying nephew Owen popping up here & there (next time, leave him home, Sarah. He's a kid an aunt appreciates, & adolescence won't improve him). She's eating & explaining a multi-cultural take-out lunch in a Honolulu park, then is suddenly transported to a remote location accessible by crawling over an extinct volcano on her knees.
Should you read Unfamiliar Fishes? Sure. It's a good book. You should read everything by Sarah Vowell. Sarah's devotees may like it more than I - a mere fan - did. It did make me more curious about Hawaiian culture & history. Unfamiliar Fishes does not pretend to be more than it is.
I like how Sarah Vowell writes history. She does her research (which includes the touristy experience), mulls it over, absorbs it, then rolls out what she's learned in an anecdotal style - including digressions, centered in first person. You rarely get the impression she's referring to a stack of index cards. She provides a brief bibliography but no index or footnotes. It's the kind of writing that wins you an A+ in high school English & sometimes History, but in college you usually get away with it only in Creative Writing. It does count for something with me that she majored in Modern Languages at Montana State.
The virtues of Unfamiliar Fishes are the virtues of all Vowell's books & essays: Intelligence; dogged research; biting wit; the courage to confront the ugliness & horrific violence of American history, particularly with regard to our mash-up of the protestant imperative to evangelize & the capitalist imperative to exploit (a national psychosis that plagues us still) & how these are uniquely allied in our history in both chattel slavery & manifest destiny. Our deadly march across the continent made the British Raj in India look benign by comparison.
Her drollness (which may be a character flaw harnessed as an asset, who can tell? ) & inability to overlook an irony (Is anything not ironic in American history?) wears on me after awhile. Fortunately, her books are brief. A coffeehouse date with her is sufficient, & when she's a guest on Letterman, I don't find myself wishing Sarah had a third segment; only that Dave would let her finish a complete thought & give her a chance to sell her book.
Unfamiliar Fishes, although a history of Hawaii after Europeans found it, feels like an extended appendage to The Wordy Shipmates. It follows a small bunch of New England protestant missionaries - elite descendants of those shipmates - to Hawaii where they, in unwilling concert with New England whalers, set in motion the terrible energies that destroyed indigenous Hawaiian culture with religion, disease, & good old capitalism, & basically conquered Hawaii from within, like the infectious diseases we brought to the islands that reduced the native population from an estimated 300,000 to 40,000 in a few decades.
The Great Irony for me is that Hawaii had produced a tyrant-king, Kamehameha I, before the missionaries arrived, whose bloody unification of the islands (thanks to the introduction of cannon & muskets) & whose son's subsequent destruction of the old religious order, priestly caste, & taboos had made it easier for missionaries to infest the place. Like the Sioux when they became a buffalo-hunting horse culture, Hawaiians had to re-imagine their history & origins when Kamehameha I took over. Sarah does not idealize Hawaiian culture. Rather, she makes clear that the Hawaiian Islands group had embarked on its own messy path to nationhood & development of a common identity, which was tragically foiled - as history tells us too-commonly occurred - by foreign imperialists.
I found myself putting the book aside, picking it up, & rushing through the last quarter of Unfamiliar Fishes. This happens often enough with overlong novels, but Vowell writes a companionable sort of prose in which the author is almost as much the subject as the ... subject. A few possible reasons: Pasty-faced Sarah in Hawaii is a bit like Santa Claus versus the Martians. She loves Hawaii. But everyone loves Hawaii whether or not we've been there. Authentic old Hawaiian culture is not only really alien to western culture, it's far more unfamiliar & exotic to us mainland Yurrupean-Americans than the Native American cultures of North America we conquered nation-by-nation & tribe-by-tribe over 300 years. Vowell's juxtaposition of humor & horror didn't work for me the way it did in The Wordy Shipmates. The Puritan colonist shipmates really were my ancestors on my mom's side. But by the 1890's there were serious, vocal dissenters to America's expansionist designs, including Mark Twain. One can imagine siding with Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch. I thought, maybe it's just me, that I can't accept the limitations of the book. I concluded that was not the situation. Sarah tried to cram way too much information into a 238 page book. She had to give us three back stories: The Hawaiians', the missionaries', & the discovery of Hawaii by Europeans. She had to tell us how America annexed Hawaii. & she had to provide a travelogue, a sort of tourist's guide to the popular & obscure attractions, geological & historical. So she flits all over the place, from island to island, past to present, with her precocious & annoying nephew Owen popping up here & there (next time, leave him home, Sarah. He's a kid an aunt appreciates, & adolescence won't improve him). She's eating & explaining a multi-cultural take-out lunch in a Honolulu park, then is suddenly transported to a remote location accessible by crawling over an extinct volcano on her knees.
Should you read Unfamiliar Fishes? Sure. It's a good book. You should read everything by Sarah Vowell. Sarah's devotees may like it more than I - a mere fan - did. It did make me more curious about Hawaiian culture & history. Unfamiliar Fishes does not pretend to be more than it is.
Labels: Rix reviews, what I'm reading
Comments:
<< Home
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
A very interesting review of a book I would probably not even know about, let alone want to read. I am still contemplating, mainly because I already know a great deal of Hawai'ian history. Funny, the only part of Oahu I lived was Kailua, which, as many know, is where Obama was raised. It's a haole haven on the island (and face it, Obama's family was white despite the fact that Obama himself was on the surface black - not being racial, just pointing out something). Haole means white, and those of us that are white tend to move to Kailua. I lived there, I know this. Would be interesting to read alleged facts and give you a post-review!
Post a Comment
<< Home
