Reading Joan Didion Taught Me How to Not Write About Hawaiʻi

I was twenty-two years old when I first read Joan Didion’s writing on Hawaiʻi. It was 2018, and I had just graduated from college. Unlike my friends, who had all landed prestigious jobs in big cities, I was unemployed. I lived with my parents.

For grocery money, I worked as a freelance copywriter and slopped beer for tourists at a brewery in Koko Marina. When not working, I walked—along Kalanianaʻole Highway to Kawaikui Beach Park, where I lay under striped shadows of palm trees and made friends with unhoused residents who invited me to barbecues (that my mom did not let me attend). I walked up Hao Street to the back of ‘Āina Haina Valley, where I climbed Wailupe Loop and ate thimbleberries at the ridge’s windy top as the cars below me crawled through Waimānalo. I walked the cul-de-sacs of my parents’ neighborhood, numb hands gripping the leashes of my mom’s three dogs as they barked at the neighbor’s golden retriever, Kilo, who patrolled the corner lot. I was depressed. I was claustrophobic. When my last unemployed friend landed a job in DC, I got desperate.

I emailed a former professor of mine to ask if he knew anyone looking to hire an English major on the mainland. Instead of replying with jobs, he said he would have pegged me as someone who secretly wanted to be a novelist. He touched on an unspoken dream. But back then, I thought it would be wasteful to spend a life writing after the years my parents had worked service jobs, cleaning pools and renting out bouncy castles so I could go to a private high school, a good college. I told my professor this, and he said that, though it was nearly impossible to make a living on writing alone, there were ways—teaching and freelancing—to survive. He told me to calculate the money it would cost to live the life I wanted, to think about whether writing could give me this. He told me to look into MFA programs, which I had never heard of. He recommended I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

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In the fifteenth essay in Slouching, “Letter from Paradise, 21˚ 19’ N., 157˚ 52’ W.,” Joan Didion writes: “It begins, of course, in what we remember.”

What I remember is this: The first time I read that essay, I was so angry I had to put the book down. I sat cross-legged on the carpet of my childhood bedroom, legs itching so I would not drip circles of sweat on my sheets and yellow the mattress. The rest of my family was asleep, our house quiet with July’s heat, but through my open louvers I heard the flat chop of my neighbors mincing garlic, slicing mangoes and onions for the chutney they sold at Saturday’s farmers market.

Up until then, I had enjoyed Didion’s unflinching prose. I was learning from her to really notice what I noticed. I’d loved escaping through her interrogation of American life, her deconstruction of John Wayne, the love letter she wrote to her hometown of Sacramento, and most of all, the breadth and wealth of her images. But when it came to how she viewed Honolulu—and by extension, Hawaiʻi—I could not stomach it.

Of the many essays the late Didion has published, only two of them take place in Hawaiʻi. In both of these, “Letter from Paradise” and “In the Islands” (published in The White Album), Didion seeks to establish a sense of place for her readers. To her credit, she does not linger on the fantasy of paradise so many have adopted for the Islands, that of hula dancers and pineapples. Instead, her work quietly critiques the type of people who enjoy this fantasy because, Didion tells us, “I lack all temperament for paradise, real or facsimile.”

But the overarching thesis she constructs for the Islands is just as, if not more, problematic than paradise: “If there is a single aura which pervades Honolulu,” she writes, “one mood which lends the lights a feverish luster and the pink catamarans a heartbreaking absurdity and which engages the imagination as mere paradise never could, that mood is, inescapably, one of war.”

Since I first read Slouching, I have tried to get to the root of my anger when it comes to Didion’s essays on Hawaiʻi. The simple answer I’ve come to is that the writing is reductive and prescriptive. By formulating a thesis of war, Didion boils Hawaiʻi, its people, and its history down to a singular “mood” informed by colonial patriarchy. What she “remembers” is not what Hawaiʻi truly is.

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Eventually, I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem again. Though I did not enjoy the experience, I finished it. As I read, I began to notice that, even in the essays I liked, there was a similar theme to their construction: a time or place or person was taken and simplified to a single feeling or thesis that the thing or person had inspired in Didion, whether that was “the presence of money in Newport” found in the “The Seacoast of Despair,” the lostness of “Guaymas, Sonora,” or the winding despair that consumes Didion’s youthful romance with New York in “Goodbye to All That.” The final five essays were colored in decay, echoing the prescription of war found in “Letter from Paradise.”

After I finished Slouching, I applied to MFAs, like my professor had suggested, and landed a spot in the MFA program at the University of Oregon. My first few months in Eugene were full of all you could want from the Pacific Northwest: foggy coasts sprinkled with agate, drunken river floats, hot spring soaks under shooting stars while clutching thermoses of whiskey. But in March of the first year of my MFA, the pandemic hit. I found myself stuck in a small valley that, over the next few months, swelled with pollen from nearby grass farms, then smoke from summer’s wildfires, and grew increasingly oppressive. I spent two and a half years exiled from my home and family in Hawaiʻi.

In April 2020, on the suggestion of a friend, I began reading From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi by Haunani-Kay Trask, the Native Hawaiian activist, author, and poet. At this point, it was nearly two years since I’d first read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I was absorbed in learning to write fiction and, because of this, had forgotten some of my anger toward Didion. Trask’s book reawakened it.

From a Native Daughter is a book of theory that attacks the United States’ illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Islands. At the same time, it is a call to action, born from Trask’s desire to raise awareness in fellow Native Hawaiians, of their current dual circumstances as kānaka maoli and as a colonized people, and of the necessary steps to overthrow the American neocolonial imperialist state. In the third section of the book, Trask quotes the political philosopher Frantz Fanon as he writes in The Wretched of the Earth to talk about how American mythmakers like Didion have contributed to the destruction of the Hawaiian way of life: “By a perverted logic, [colonialism] turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” Trask then continues in her own words: “The first step in the colonization process . . . [is] the deculturation of a people. What better way to take our culture than to remake our image?”

I read Trask in my bathtub during the first winter of the pandemic, reread her under blooming cottonwoods on the banks of the Willamette, and again while masked on a bench in Amazon Park, where I paused every few pages to watch teens drop into the skatepark’s bowl. Trask gave me the language and the knowledge to help me realize why I’d so vehemently opposed Didion’s thesis about Hawaiʻi—and why, too, I’d first applied to MFAs: I was angry and wanted to prove white settlers like Didion wrong when it came to their perception of the Hawaiian Islands.

By formulating a thesis of war, Didion boils Hawaiʻi, its people, and its history down to a singular “mood” informed by colonial patriarchy.

But reading Trask also showed me that writing against whiteness wasn’t enough for my work to be reparative. Trask taught me that decolonization, in our lives and our writing, is a communal effort that must include experiences and histories beyond that of a single person. It is not just anger against our oppressors but love for our people and community that leads to liberation.

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Didion’s essay “In the Islands” documents eight years of trips to Honolulu, from 1969 to 1977. Like “Letter from Paradise,” this essay is concerned with the aura of war, touring places steeped in this sentiment—Punchbowl Cemetery, the national memorial where, nestled into the crater of an extinct volcano, Didion watches a family from the mainland bury their son, who died in the Vietnam War; Schofield Barracks, the headquarters for the United States Army in Hawaiʻi, which Didion drives to in 1977 to pay homage to the late James Jones, who was stationed at the barracks when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.

“Certain places,” Didion writes, “seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner . . . A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones.”

If Didion were alive and in front of me, I would ask her: How can Hawaiʻ​​i, an archipelago with its own sovereign people, belong to James Jones, a white man from the continent who lived in Honolulu for only five years and spent most of his time there in classrooms and on military bases? Can one even love a place, let alone claim it (which itself sounds like colonization), if it is a place whose history and culture one does not respect enough to even learn, let alone immerse oneself in?

To “wrench,” to “shape,” to “render” and “remake” are largely violent verbs. They are things one often does without consent. What Didion proposes, in her literary claims to place, sounds a lot like what Trask calls deculturation, like the distortion, disfiguration, and destruction of a place and people, which are among colonialism’s main goals. What Didion is proposing resembles literary imperialism.

In Didion’s literary universe, Hawaiʻi does not exist before its colonization. Her essays do not include the voices or perspectives of Hawaiians or locals who live in the Islands. When it comes to her timeline for Hawaiʻi, she is concerned only with the sugar feudalism that dominated the Islands before World War II and the “feverish luster” of Honolulu postwar. She depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.

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My ancestors first came to the Hawaiian Islands four generations ago. They were Mormon missionaries, Irish fieldhands, displaced Germans and Samoans. As someone who was born to and raised by settlers of the Hawaiian Islands, who is not kānaka maoli, I often wonder where it is that I belong. I know that Hawaiʻ​​i can never belong to me, or anyone that is not Indigenous Hawaiian. But part of me, too, feels like I will always belong to the Islands. Like it is Hawaiʻi that possesses me.

In the two and a half years that I was unable to return to the Islands due to the pandemic, Hawaiʻi consumed my life and work, an obsessive longing that bled into my fiction and resulted in many nights of insomnia. In the dark, I walked—just like I did back on Oʻahu—from the weed store below my apartment on High Street and to Skinner Butte Park, where I paced an eight-mile loop around the river path, waiting for the sun to rise over the water, the nails of my pinky toes cutting into my flesh as I imagined the Willamette was the Pacific Ocean.

When I think of writing about what it is like to be from Hawaiʻi, I think of the person in my fiction workshop at the University of Oregon who, in one of the creaky wooden reading rooms tucked into a corner of Knight Library, asked me, “Why are all of your stories set in Hawaiʻi when nothing exciting happens in them?” As if a story set in Hawaiʻi needed to have some grand adventure or purpose. I think about the mentor whose praise kept me writing through the pandemic and how, on one of our walks through the meandering paths of Amazon Park, they told me that the mention of race and politics in the story I’d written confused its “aboutness.” I think about feedback I got just last year, feedback arguing that the place I was writing about needed to be more “exotic,” that the main character needed to “go to impoverished places to connect with their Native identity.” I think about the many ways peers and mentors and editors have pushed me toward the stereotype of Hawaiʻi that they consume every day in popular culture. I think about how to write away from all of this.

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In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison writes, “Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense.” Though Didion rejects the fantasy of the Hawaiian paradise most often found in popular culture, she embraces and reinforces the American military industrial complex in the Islands through the “aura of war” she proposes in “Letter from Paradise.” She establishes a canon twice over: in the literary canon of James Jones that she maps over Oʻahu as she visits locations in From Here to Eternity throughout “In the Islands,” and by contributing to the American mythology of Hawaiʻi as a place populated with the history of white American settlers. Her words reinforce American notions of empire. They support the illegal occupation of Hawaiʻi and work to actively erase kānaka maoli from the Hawaiian Islands.

Aboutness, defined by Yiyun Li in her essay “Against Aboutness,” is “a GPS system” that ensures “you will be delivered to your destination, without the danger of going astray, without the need to detour.” For example, the aboutness of Lilo & Stitch would be: After the death of her parents, a young girl unknowingly adopts an extraterrestrial fugitive as a pet and teaches him about love and ʻohana, ultimately saving both him from the Galactic Federation and her own family in the process. Though the film is set in Hawaiʻi, it is in no way about Hawaiʻi.

This “GPS system” may sound helpful to beginning writers, but it is in fact dangerous. According to Li, aboutness “places [work] in a specimen case” and is often used to map and claim certain places within the literary landscape. While Li is interested in how aboutness operates in fiction, much of what she says can also be applied to nonfiction, especially when it comes to place and colonization. Even when we start with honest motives, Li writes, “Trailblazers . . . easily become settlers; adventures become occupiers.” When we try to make our writing about something, as Didion does, these themes and theses colonize our characters and the places we write, imposing a meaning onto them that they often did not ask for and that, in many instances, is harmful to them.

I know that, like Didion, what I remember can never encompass all that Hawaiʻi is. That there will always be people who can, and will, critique my writing and my motives. But even if I do not go so far as to make any cultural change for good, I hope to do no harm. I strive not to write about Hawaiʻi, not to map my own sentiment or ideology over the Hawaiian Islands, but to locate my work in the one place I will always call home.

When we try to make our writing about something, as Didion does, these themes and theses colonize our characters and the places we write, imposing a meaning onto them that they often did not ask for and that, in many instances, is harmful to them.

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This past summer, after finishing the first year of my PhD at the University of Tennessee, I finally returned to Hawaiʻi. I booked a ticket with no return date and ended up staying for an entire month.

Once there, I found my home populated by newcomers who’d come to visit during lockdown and ended up staying after buying the homes of my neighbors. I slipped through trails like Kaʻau Crater that had been ruined by unsustainable hiking practices. I huddled in the corners of beaches like Kāhala that had been stolen through rising sea levels and property owners’ encroachment. I was forced to confront that both the Hawaiʻi I’d grown up with and the Hawaiʻi of waterfalls and white-sand beaches that I’d created and idealized to survive my years away did not exist.

Most of my month home was spent on Oʻahu, trying to repair relationships that had suffered during my time away—relationships with my family, my community, and the land. But during my last week, I treated myself to a few days on the Big Island, where I camped at my parents’ unfinished cabin in ʻĀhualoa. There was no water or electricity, so, each morning, I drove half an hour to Honokaʻa Café, where I drank black tea and ate bifanas served on fresh sweet bread, using the café’s Wi-Fi to freelance.

One morning, a local aunty sat with me. We got to talking about our families, our histories, how we’d ended up in Honokaʻa. We found that, somehow, my grandmother had known her mother. They’d grown up together on Maui. Instead of feeling claustrophobic at this reminder of how small Hawaiʻi was, how defined my place was in it, I felt held. I felt seen, something I had not experienced in the thirty months I’d spent on the mainland. When she left, she gave me a hug and said, “This is why we gotta walaʻau. So we can figure out how it all fits.”

I could tell you that this is why I write too. To figure out where I came from, how it has shaped who I am, how it all fits. But I am not sure that is important. I am not sure it is important to tell you what my work is interested in or the many insecurities it is plagued with. Because now, as I sit at my desk in Knoxville, Tennessee, watching the groundhog that lives below my house tunnel through the hedge of kudzu, all I want to say is this: Instead of writing letters from Hawaiʻi or even for Hawaiʻi, all I want, really, is to write love letters to Hawaiʻi.

A mentor once told me, “We write to the places we’re not.” I know that is true for how I feel about Hawaiʻi—and think that too, perhaps, is true for Didion and her relationship with Sacramento. There is a moment in her essay “Notes from a Native Daughter” where she realizes that in memorializing the Sacramento of her childhood, in showing how the Valley has changed in the generations since her family first settled there, that she is perhaps doing nothing more than writing to “the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older.”

I wonder, while reading and rereading that line, if writing love letters to Hawaiʻi stems from my own selfishness, my own desire to not only preserve what I have loved but to remind Hawaiʻi that I am still here, that even though I now live an ocean and a continent away, I have not abandoned the Islands. That I still remember our history, still hope for a future in spite of the fact that, with every day I spend away, with every newcomer that buys the homes of my neighbors, the future that I write toward becomes more and more impossible. I wonder, if in writing toward futility, my words, too, are colonizing the land.

It has taken me four years to get to the bottom of the anger I feel when I read Joan Didion’s essays on the Hawaiian Islands. Four years to begin to solidify what I want from my own fiction and nonfiction. When I critique Didion’s writing, when I make claims on what her writing is doing or contributing to, I am not saying we should cancel her. I am not saying that I can (or could ever) do better than her. I am not even saying that I am right. What I am saying is that there are things our literary heroes, like Didion, could do better. And these things, just like what they do well, are things that we can learn from to better write toward our truths, as individuals and as a collective, toward our liberation.

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