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54 pages 1 hour read

Alan Brennert

Moloka'i

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003

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Important Quotes

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“The news was telephoned from Diamond Head and quickly spread across the city like a shadow across the sun; the festive banners and bunting put up in anticipation of Kalākaua’s return were quickly torn down and replaced with solemn black crepe.”


(Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 13)

As the steamer bringing the king back from the United States flies a flag at half mast, a signal he has died, the mood in Honolulu changes, and the city transforms from one filled with joy to one filled with grief. Imagining the news as a shadow blocking out the sun conveys the totality of it, blanketing the city, like solemn black crepe covering the sun.

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“Pono lay on the ground, half blinded, the tears in his eyes not from the smoke but from the thought of what he was about to lose. His cheek had been abraded by the bramble of cane, but the livid red blemish beneath his left eye was a wound of a very different sort, and a mark—permanent and ineradicable—of his shame and his fear.”


(Part 1, Chapter 2, Pages 20-21)

As the Health Inspector attempts to apprehend Pono, the overseers set the cane field ablaze, smoking him out like a hunted animal. While the cane scratches him, a wound without pain marks him more completely—the blemish associated with Hansen’s disease wounds the body and the status, stigmatizing its bearer.

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“And now its offspring comes—grown like a mold from the culture of our lust and laziness—and my children, it comes to kill us! To burn the very memory of us from the earth as lava boils away the sea, and if we let it happen, then we deserve it.”


(Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 35)

In a possible echo of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Hawaiian preacher at Dorothy’s church personifies sin, especially sexual sins. He claims that these sins produce “leprosy” as punishment. Invoking apocalyptic imagery, the preacher compares the spread of Hansen’s disease to the cooling of lava in the ocean, seeing loss in a process that actually helped create the Hawaiian islands.

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“The day after Pono’s departure, shortly before five in the afternoon, Henry Kalama’s world split open like a matryoshka yet again.”


(Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 48)

Henry faces tragedy after tragedy—from the death of the king to Pono’s diagnosis and exile to Kalaupapa to Rachel’s own diagnosis. His world had fractured many times already, but, like a Russian nesting doll, the larger doll opened up to reveal a surprise. This surprise portends the end of the Hawaiian monarchy, as the Americans arrive with their military might to safeguard the property of wealthy Americans against a non-existent threat.

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“She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear becomes a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.”


(Part 2, Chapter 5, Page 60)

Rachel arrives on Moloka’i aboard the grimy steamer carrying the people with Hansen’s disease like animals in a pen. Before she sees the shore, Rachel, numb with pain, fear, and disgust, is compared to a sponge that has soaked up so much that it cannot exist as anything but what it has retained.

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“And as the days went by without Violet, Rachel understood what she couldn’t comprehend at the king’s funeral—feeling an absence even worse than that of her distant family, an absence that was like a sore that wouldn’t heal.”


(Part 2, Chapter 6, Page 92)

Rachel befriends a girl at Bishop Home who is ill and lonely. They read Dorothy’s letters, and Rachel feels no fear while looking at the girl’s tumors and protrusions. Losing such a new friend, and one so close, creates a symbolic wound and absence that, like many of the tumors she sees, will not heal. Violet, Rachel seems to understand, will be followed in death by many more, perhaps even Rachel.

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“The sweet cleansing water washed over her, soaking through her cotton underclothes, making them billow in the water like the wings of a jellyfish.”


(Part 2, Chapter 7, Page 104)

After Catherine and Sister Victor share plum wine to boost Catherine’s spirits, Catherine gets drunk. She runs to the ocean, and her surrender to the waves recalls a jellyfish, a beautiful marine creature that rides on the waves, carried by the current of the ocean.

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“Catherine would make her way to the edge of the bluffs and peer down at sharp lava teeth fringing the maw of the sea. Each time she prayed she would not see Rachel’s tiny body impaled on the lava rocks or floating on the raging surf.”


(Part 2, Chapter 8, Page 115)

After Catherine slaps Rachel, angry that she denied God and says she hates him, Rachel runs away, only to be caught by Moko, who hits Rachel harder and forces her to do manual labor. As Catherine searches for Rachel, she worries she will see Rachel after a fall. Referencing the maw of the sea, Catherine imagines the sea eating Rachel, digesting the girl’s body. This image also foreshadows that Catherine will jump and attempt to die by suicide from a cliff, but Rachel will save her.

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“Henry glanced at Rachel as she plucked a glass ball weighted with seaweed from the water. She tossed away the bulbous kelp and held the globe aloft triumphantly; it looked like a marble from the land of giants.”


(Part 2, Chapter 9, Page 129)

As Rachel plays at the beach with Henry and Haleola, Henry sees Rachel pick up a glass ball, remove the seafood, and clear away the strands. These descriptions evoke not only wounds from Hansen’s disease—“bulbous”—but also evoke the world in a small state. Calling the glass both a ball and a globe foreshadows that Rachel will one day pull off the strands of bulbous tumors and grab the world.

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Very funny, bug, she told the leprosy germ. But don’t try that again. Gathering her dignity about her like a slightly tattered shawl, she walked slowly away from the beach, doing her best to ignore the protests of her body.”


(Part 3, Chapter 10, Page 144)

Anticipating how Rachel personifies her disease, Haleola personifies Hansen’s disease again and again. Here, after a fall on a small dune, she blames what she calls the bug, a nickname no doubt related to her knowledge of the bacteria and the “bugs” that cause Hansen’s disease. Using apostrophe, she directly addresses this disease and compares her dignity, which is abstract, to a tattered shawl, evoking its damage playfully.

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“Rachel looked down at the bandage and thought: goodbye, sore. Goodbye, leprosy. Someday I’m sending you into exile, like you sent me.”


(Part 3, Chapter 11, Page 164)

As Rachel tries a new treatment and has her tumors cut away, she imagines a future for the disease that it had planned for her. Personifying Hansen’s disease, she speaks to it directly, addressing it using apostrophe. Exile for Rachel has been about sickness; exile for Hansen’s disease would be a cure.

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“Her eyes fluttered open and she saw, in a brilliant shaft of moonlight, an owl perched on the branch of the eucalyptus tree outside her window. The owl hooted again, and now she heard, as from a distance, the sound of drums and a chant.”


(Part 3, Chapter 12, Page 186)

As Haleola dies, she experiences visions and dreams, and during her last night, she echoes Keo as he died many years before. The sound of drums and chants, representative of the ancestors and an invitation to join them in death, rings clear to her, and the image of the owl recalls its place in native lore as a guide for lost souls.

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“She watched wax drip down the length of a candle, its flame writhing as if in torment, and only then realized the breadth of her anger, far worse than what she’d felt on the long-ago day she’d struck Rachel.”


(Part 3, Chapter 13, Page 187)

Catherine considers her anger, thinking about her confrontation with Rachel, when she denied God, and now in a similar moment, Catherine echoes Rachel, angry at her mother who died by suicide, and personifying the candle and its flame, imagining the pains of hell, the punishment usually reserved for death by suicide in Catholic dogma.

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“This was life, and if some things were kapu, others weren’t; she had to stop regretting the ones that were and start enjoying the ones that were not.”


(Part 3, Chapter 14, Page 216)

As she leaves the research institute, tired of being a subject rather than a patient, Rachel accounts for her life and what has been forbidden (kapu) and what isn’t, choosing to accept that her choices are not free but rather dictated by restrictions put on those with Hansen’s disease. She decides to emphasize her person and not the disease, making decisions that don’t bring pain or rejection.

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“Laid out in her favorite floral dress she looked, Rachel thought, like Sleeping Beauty awaiting a prince’s kiss. Because she was, she truly was, the most beautiful woman Rachel had ever known.”


(Part 3, Chapter 15, Page 230)

During Leilani’s funeral, Rachel finally sees the fantastical beauty of Leilani, who in death seems alive and beautiful, just as Sleeping Beauty did. The comparison of Leilani to Sleeping Beauty also makes clear that her wish to be this unblemished beauty has always been a fairy tale.

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“As Rachel gazed into her daughter’s eyes she fought an overwhelming impulse to snatch her away—to run with her to some distant place where no one could ever take her away. But she knew that that place, the only place Rachel could take her, was called death, and she would let her daughter go there before her time.”


(Part 3, Chapter 16, Page 250)

Although Rachel understands she has no choice but to give Ruth up for adoption, her impulsive and natural desires force her to question that choice. Keeping Ruth, Rachel decides, leads to death—death she imagines as both a literal place and a figurative one—as Rachel worries her body and blood remain contagious.

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“She had been apprehensive about returning to this house, had expected it to be a crucible of memories, of ghosts; but the laughter and shouts of these children seemed to drown out any whispering phantoms.”


(Part 4, Chapter 17, Page 271)

Catherine remains in Hawai’i for many years, having escaped Ithaca after her father died by suicide. Imagining the house as a place to melt and reform all those things that haunt her, Catherine instead finds a lively house, not unlike Bishop Home, and she can’t hear the memories personified as “whispering phantoms” above the din of life and young children.

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“War was raging outside, friends were dying, becoming heroes, and he was denied the chance to take his place alongside them. His death, when it came, would be far from the scene of a battle: a sickly, anonymous end of no great moment or valor.”


(Part 4, Chapter 19, Page 299)

Crossen dramatizes the war, happening islands away from him, in theaters across the Pacific and Europe. Foreshadowing his actual end, these lines accurately predict Crossen’s death, as he’s found floating in the waters around the island, far from any battle—except the one Rachel says he fights against himself and his disease.

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“Next came the sound of harrowed flesh. And like a man going to war, Kenji calmly got out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and slipped on his shoes.”


(Part 4, Chapter 19, Page 300)

Crossen physically attacks his girlfriend, Felicia, and Rachel and Kenji often call the cops on him. Reaching his limit, Kenji becomes the young fighter he was once was and walks next door, acting like a soldier—employing martial imagery as Hawai’i remains under martial law.

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“But her grief was still vast, and her anger so fierce and raw it frightened her. Had she owned a gun she would have long since marched into the Kalaupapa jail and shot Crossen dead with neither a moment’s hesitation nor a single regret.”


(Part 4, Chapter 20, Page 304)

Rachel continues to come to terms with Kenji’s absence and his murder by Crossen. She uses words to describe grief that elsewhere describe the ocean in the novel, suggesting that grief, like waves or the ocean, submerges her, threatening to drown her with repetitive waves of sadness.

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“As Kenji’s casket descended into the grave the awful finality of it engulfed Rachel like a wave, and with an intensity of pain far exceeding any she had ever felt from leprosy. She wanted to jump in the open grave, to let the earth swallowing Kenji swallow her as well; she already felt dead in everything but name.”


(Part 4, Chapter 20, Page 305)

As Rachel buries her husband, she describes the pain as a wave, employing the endless repetition of the waves and the subsequent submerging to demonstrate how grief, like a current, drowns her. The imagery of submerging goes further as she personifies the earth, imagining Kenji’s grave as a mouth.

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“Rachel cried out. A wordless, inchoate cry, like that of an animal in pain.”


(Part 4, Chapter 21, Page 346)

As Sarah explains that Kimo exhibited signs of Hansen’s disease and that Dorothy hid him in the jungle, Rachel becomes like an animal, coming to terms with emotions long hidden. The descriptions of the cry suggest one that is incomplete and insufficient for the pain it expresses.

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“The ache she’d felt for fifty years was gone and she could feel again what life was like without it: sweet, like a slice of cake from Love’s Bakery, or a cold glass of Tahiti lemonade on a hot day.”


(Part 4, Chapter 21, Page 347)

Rachel visits with Sarah, her long estranged sister, and, as they view Dorothy’s grave, Rachel recognizes that her mother loved her and didn’t abandon her all those years ago. As she forgives her mother, Rachel describes her life now in the terms of her childhood, deploying memories from old Honolulu to symbolize her peace.

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“She wept even more fiercely, Ruth went to her without hesitation. She folded her arms around her, holding her as she would a frightened child, rocking her like the baby Rachel had not been able to cradle. And in cooing, consoling tones she told her, It’s all right. Everything’s all right. It’s all over, she said. I’m free. You’re free. It’s all right, Mother. Everything’s all right.”


(Part 4, Chapter 22, Page 371)

After Ruth explains her confinement at the Japanese concentration camp in California, Rachel recognizes that her fate and her daughter’s have intertwined. Like the Theban tragedies of ancient Greece, the more Rachel tried to avoid that fate for her daughter, the closer it came to be her future. As they console each other, Ruth imagines her mother as the daughter, reversing their roles.

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“Rachel’s face showed the scoring of time, certainly of tragedy, but also of a life well lived: of laughter and adventure as much as grief and ill fortune. Even now, in the lines around her mouth, Ruth saw the ghost of a smile haunting her mother’s face.”


(Part 4, Endnote, Page 381)

As Ruth looks inside her mother Rachel’s casket, she sees the reflection of her life in the wrinkles and marks on Rachel’s face. Consistent with the novel’s depiction of Rachel as someone who experiences both great joy and great sadness, the face that stares back carries signs of the sad and happy events that have left a mark deeper than disease, with a smile only partly seen, like a ghost, suggesting perhaps this isn’t Rachel’s final stop.

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By Alan Brennert