54 pages • 1 hour read
Alan BrennertMoloka'i
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Wounds
Wounds, both emotional and physical, pepper the novel and symbolize how the stigma of Hansen’s disease operates. These physical wounds, from the tumors Rachel originally sees at the receiving station and the blemishes that mark her and Pono as future exiles, separate those with Hansen’s disease, even after sulfa drugs help reverse the progress of the disease. Hansen’s disease creates other unseen but painful wounds, as the stigma that drives families apart hurts both those who head to Moloka’i and those who remain behind. The first mention of a wound associated with Hansen’s disease operates just this way, representing both emotional distance and physical pain and harm. As the health inspector tracks Pono down, Pono scraps his face in the 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” (20-21). Foreshadowing the growth of tumors that will soon appear on Pono’s face and demonstrating the emotional pain of the diagnosis and subsequent exile, these wounds show the double sorrow Pono will face.
These emotional wounds exist for people with Hansen’s disease but also for the families the exiled people leave behind. Confessing that his wife has left him and taken the children to avoid the shame and judgment from their neighbors and friends, Henry describes his loneliness in terms that Rachel understands. She acknowledges that, “[a]s painful a wound as it was for Rachel, she felt worse for Papa: one child in exile, and he himself exiled from the others” (144). Reflecting the emotional wounds caused by Hansen’s disease, Rachel’s description of Henry’s emotional pain reinforces the unofficial name of Hansen’s disease in Hawaii: “the sickness that tears apart families” (34).
The wounds associated with Hansen’s disease in the novel continue to create division and stigma, long after people like Rachel stop their symptoms using new drugs. At her first job in Honolulu, a man notices her right hand, transformed by Hansen’s disease, and though she doesn’t touch him, her boss fires her soon after. Meeting Ruth for the first time, Rachel sees Ruth’s fear and surprise at the same hand, an echo of the disease’s ability to create division in families. Wounds, however, heal in the novel, and Ruth’s initial reaction isn’t her last, as she touches Hokea without hesitation when she arrives on Moloka’i in 1970, a reflection of her love for her mother and a sign that stigmatization, symbolized by these wounds, can be undone:
Through her tears Rachel saw the woman’s face, cratered and oozing pus, and Rachel screamed. In her frantic rush away from the woman she collided with a young girl no older than herself, and she too had a face like a raw wound, and Rachel’s shrieks now seemed to fill the building (144).
Dolls
Dolls punctuate the beginning and end of Rachel’s life, symbolizing the way family operates and expands for her. Henry’s return from sailing represents one constant for Rachel: a doll from some foreign locale. Her ties to her dolls, an ever-expanding group of different dolls bound by her love for them, offers an ideal for family that proves unshakeable for Rachel. When her father first visits her at Bishop Home, the nuns surprise her, and, assuming she’s experiencing exile again, Rachel grieves both the friends and dolls she’ll have to leave behind: “It wasn’t fair, she had friends here, and an aunt—she wouldn’t go! She thought suddenly of her dolls, and was about to run back to Bishop Home to get them” (127).
The dolls that had accompanied her in the place of her family, the only familiar link to a childhood before Hansen’s disease, reflect something similar to her father. After her initial diagnosis, before her formal exile to Moloka’i, Henry “walked the house at night, looking at Rachel’s dolls, her toys—knowing that he would never see his daughter here, in this house, ever again” (53). Even as his family contracts—separated from Rachel by the decrees of the Health Department and Dorothy and her children by distance—the dolls represent the way family could operate, with difference acknowledged but not weaponized to create distance. At the end of Rachel’s life, as her daughter, Ruth, and granddaughter, Peggy, bury her, dolls again symbolize this enlarged notion of family. Ruth, her daughter by birth, a child forced into adoption, recognizes her lineage and her mother by placing a “cloth doll in its kapa skirt which Henry Kalama had painstakingly fashioned for his little girl, seventy-six years before” (383).
Christian and Hawaiian Names
Christianity’s connections to colonialism and conquest become clear early on in the novel. Names symbolize the figurative violence wrought by colonialism and Christianity that obliterates the link between native Hawaiians and their past. Rachel’s mother serves as an example of this practice, and, later she discovers, resistance to it. Dorothy insists on using her children’s Christian names, from Rachel and Sara to Ben and James, even though he is known as “Kimo to everyone but Mama, who disapproved of all but Christian names” (4). This refusal to allow Kimo or other native names utterance demonstrates how clear Christianity supplants and erases their native identities. Christian names, Rachel’s Grandpa Maka suggests, break the link between the Hawaiian people and their culture and history, which opens them up to the violence of the colonizer.
Maka highlights the significance of naming as the family meets to resolve their resentments in order to heal Rachel. Confessing that he dreamed of Rachel’s name before she was born—“Aouli. ‘Blue vault of heaven’” (30)—Henry acknowledges his error in naming his daughter Rachel, saying that he did it to please his wife. Henry “knew how [his] wife felt about such things” and recognized her disdain for “[t]he old ways, the old language…She wanted all our children to have Christian names, to celebrate Jehovah” (30). Maka links Rachel’s Christian name not to praise and celebration but to pain and infection, arguing, “If she is to be well, she must be given her inoa pō” (30), or divinely given name that comes to a family member in a dream. Although she maintains her faith, Rachel learns later in life that Dorothy relented in her naming practices, when she visits her brother’s grave and sees “a small wooden cross with a name carved neatly into the lateral beam: not James Kalama, surprisingly, but Kimo” (352). Coming to her own understanding of names, their value, and Kimo’s identity, Dorothy saw past a dogmatic understanding of Christianity used to erase the past of the native Hawaiians and saw in Kimo’s name his true identity.
