‘Hawai’i’ carries bold title, modern take on local strife

"Hawai’i," by Mark Panek (Lo’ihi Press, $16.95)

Some would say writer Mark Panek had a lot of gall cockroaching the title of James Michener’s famed 1959 novel, a sprawling and iconic telling of the history of the islands from its geologic birth to the mid-20th century.

But consider it a tip of the hat. Panek credits Michener both with giving him a yen to write and to move from his New York home to Hawaii in 1990.

"I might not even be a writer if it wasn’t for Michener," he said in an interview from his Hilo home.

Although "Hawai’i" is the best and first of Michener’s trademark brick-thick historical epics, it’s been reviled and dismissed since the Hawaiian Renaissance — especially the grating (and seemingly unconscious) racism of the final chapter, "The Golden Men," which posits that the "Crossroads of the Pacific" created a new kind of man, a product of both East and West.

Where Michener left off is where Panek, a University of Hawaii at Hilo English professor, begins in a novel that won the 2014 Ka Palapala Po’okela award for literature. (His "Big Happiness:The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior" won for nonfiction in 2012.)

Panek’s novel tells the real and heartbreaking story of what happened to those "Golden Men" — and there is nothing warm and glowing or romanticized about it. Hawaiian men, he says, have been disenfranchised, emasculated, made anonymous and discarded, like stones piled in a cane field.

Don’t be put off, though. "Hawai’i" is not all ugliness — far from it. The early chapters, as Panek begins to draw the reader into a rather large cast of characters, are often side-splittingly funny and as familiar as a pile of slippers on the front porch.

Panek has an ear for language and an eye for the identifying detail. He also indulges himself with not-so-subtle tee-hees: the developers Brokem & Cellit and the public relations firm Brushett & Hyde.

The book opens with "Da Boyz" at a UH football game, losing as usual but seeming about to cover the spread in which each has invested with an illegal gambling ring. The repartee is spot-on: "News flash, Coach: It’s OVA!" "Rodja that." "Automatic."

When Panek describes a crowd as "our-son-paddles-for-Lanikai-Canoe-Club, designer-aloha-wear, front-row-at-Ha-vai-ee-Theatre-for-Sons-of-Hilo," you know just who he’s talking about.

They are "folks who wanted to care about Hawaiians, wanted to be Hawaiian themselves in that pathetic Hawaiian-at-heart way."

Among my favorite asides is a little rant on newbie haoles attempting to speak pidgin: "You were embarrassed for them. All you ever thought was hasn’t anyone TOLD him?"

The author’s word choice, hyphenated phrases (perhaps a bit overused) and italics telegraph the mindsets of a diverse group of locals, from the Outrigger Canoe Club crowd to Windward side "gangstas," from earnest activists to third-generation politicians wholly owned by big money.

Panek’s "Big Happiness" was the true story of a Windward Oahu man who rises to a high place in Japan as a sumo wrestler, then, on his return to Hawaii after an injury, is murdered in an as-yet-unsolved knifing on a rural road.

Beginning with the research for that book, Panek has come to know his territory intimately, though he himself is not "local."

"Hawai’i" is loosely based on the controversy over proposed megadevelopment of Kahuku’s Turtle Bay Resort (called here Dolphin Bay). Virtually every "playa" ("stakeholder" in development-speak) is represented: imperious investors, the powerful land-owning Mormon Church, the Legislature and Governor’s Office, the sovereignty movement, the conservative old Hawaii represented by the Merrie Monarch hula competition, UH, drug dealers and users, the average Pearl City householder, trust-fund surfers, second- and third-home part-time residents and Kahala millionaires.

Panek confidently enters the smoke-filled rooms, flies to Asia on a lavish gubernatorial golf junket, represents the anger and savvy tactics of Hawaiian activists trying to protect their ancestors’ bones and their family’s lands. The novel illustrates the rabid hunger of each segment: the simple desire of a Hawaiian family man for an affordable and unthreatened home; the rapacious, violent and angry need for power of the gambling, drug-dealing criminal underworld; the ignorance and unconscious racism of foreign developers; and the dark side of the smiling, lei-wearing, charm-talking political realm.

And somehow the characters, even the villains, are likeable because they are fully realized. For much of the book, we’re in their heads. Panek eschews the usual omniscient voice or first person, instead interspersing dialogue with segments that go within the minds of characters, eavesdropping on their private thoughts, the things they dare not say.

Some are sincere but misguided, some are well-intended fools. Everyone has an agenda.

Sean Hayashi, the young "fixer" for a Chinese development company, plots the perfect political career and marriage to the perfect "Hello Kitty" Japanese-American princess. His philosophy:Always appear as though you "don’t give a f—."

Sean’s hanabata-days friend is Ikaika Na’imipono ("strong searcher for justice"), the conflicted taro grower, weary from battle after battle (H-3, Waiahole Valley, etc.) but a riveting presence nevertheless. All you can do is shake your head at Hayashi’s shallowness when he looks over the emerald richness of his friend’s loi and thinks perhaps he’ll beg a few keiki to plant in the patch of dirt off his own lanai.

Like other characters in "Hawai’i," he doesn’t get it. Panek leaves a bit of room for hope; a couple of characters do have epiphanies. (In real life the state and Turtle Bay Resort in April agreed to set aside a large chunk of land for preservation after community protests.) But the readers knows that most will muddle on in their cluelessness.

If Dolphin Bay doesn’t pan out, there’ll be another project tomorrow.