Hawai'i, Nativity, and the New World
(This piece explores the idea of the New World, which is essential to the idea of America. Reworked from a section of the ‘Hawai’i Notebooks Introduction,’ it places the Garden of Eden in the future, rather than in the past. Most importantly, it offers a radical reframing of what it means to be, or become, ‘native.’)
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Hawai’i, Nativity, and the New World
The Big Island of Hawai’i is the New World in miniature. In this, it is an experiment similar to America, but still fundamentally original— like a half-brother, born of the same spirit in different lands.
The island is a perfect metaphor, symbol, or synecdoche for the New World in part because of its isolation— a single island in the middle of the ocean, as far as possible from any major landmass. It’s a specific example, a circle of green highlighted by blue, a constrained experiment of a mini-continent. It’s representative, in the way that the strangers on a lifeboat are representative of the population of the ship, especially since it contains a majority of Earth’s biomes and can host an incredible diversity of life-forms. It’s almost like the simulation designers put this part of the map into the Earth Game as an Easter Egg, a practice level, or a post-game heaven. I understand now why Stitch from Lilo & Stitch landed his rocket here— if I were floating over Earth looking for somewhere cool to land, I’d choose Hawai’i, too. It’s obvious. These just-right green dots formed by a weird hotspot in the center of earth’s largest crustplate, swimming in the center of the blue planet’s largest blue sea, are clearly Earth’s pet project. The southeastward trail of the Hawaiian Islands is the path left by the slow movements of Earth’s Pacific Plate over her most peculiar lava leak, forging mountains that reach miles from the ocean floor in order to kiss the sky as islands. The hotspot made Kauai 5 million years ago. It has spent the last 500,000 years forming the Big Island, the newest island in the chain, a baby born a blink of a geologic eye ago, Earth’s most recent performance art project. The Big Island is now the only one still erupting; it’s where all the action is. It’s the most alive spot on the face of the Earth.
The Big Island of Hawai’i is thus, literally, the newest land, an island of active volcanoes erupting fresh layers of black rock year after year. It is, without need for metaphor, the New World. This does, of course, make it an attractive object of association for abstractions about the idea of the New World. All abstractions, all poetry, all ideas emanate from the hard facts of the Earth, auroras around the forms of nature. Thus we find that our words tend to rhyme with the world. A mind attuned to meaning-making would expect, then, that the still-erupting ever-newest land would have something to teach us about the past and possibilities of this human story we call the New World.
The “New World” is typically associated with the American supercontinent. After all, to European explorers, this literally was the “New World.” More abstractly, the “New World” is the phrase we use to describe everything that happened when the world started coming together faster, this columbian exchange of boats between continents which brought all the diversity of life on Earth into dialogue, a sort of coming-back-together of all the estranged descendants of the first unicellular organisms. It was like life itself having a high school reunion. And, of course, in the act of coming together, in the dynamic interactions of integration between parts, shit happens. Shit happens faster; the plot of the world sped up in America. It sped up wherever new peoples, new cultures, new languages, new life came into contact with one another, and in their dialogue altered each other. Interaction implies change. There was horrible, tragic destruction; there was creation, too. It is not all good or bad; it’s just what happened. Hopefully, we can learn from it to make the future better.
The idea of the New World is a cultural extension of the historical event. It teaches humans that we can lean into the interactions of diversity, we can participate in creation, destruction, and the generation of novelty, we can speed up the progress of the world.
The New World as a place is a sort of garden where all living things can grow together, where life from all over the world can make themselves at home in dialogue with each other; the New World as an idea involves ourselves as conscious gardeners. With humans as part of the ecosystem, we can imagine human art, language, and philosophy as growths of the garden; we’d like to smash them together and “make them new,” too. Cultural movements of the New World, such as modernism and metamodernism, acknowledge that we have an active role to play in the remaking of the world. In one sense, the world is always becoming new, always evolving whether we want it to or not. The idea of the New World helps us humans come to terms with this and become better co-creators of the ever-new world. America, at its best, understands itself as an autopoietic story; we the people are both the authors and the protagonists of the story, which we have the right to write and re-write. In some ways, the story we write is constrained by the accidents of history; but, there is always a sense of the New World as emergent, as fundamentally new, not something that could be fully predicted by the past— something free to break from the past, to leap beyond constraints, to be surprised at the shapes reality can take.
America is a garden where life from all over the world can be replanted. On this vast and diverse continent we call Turtle Island, life can find any kine home it needs to thrive. There are many soils, many waters, many habitats for living things to wriggle into the shape of— and, in their wriggling, living creatures carve slightly new contours back into the land. Wine grapes from the old world found California suited them even better than Italy, and the child of immigrants from Africa can become President of the United States. The first tree I ever climbed was the red-leafed Japanese maple, whose welcome presence popped a colorful contrast into the green canopy of my childhood home in southern Massachusetts. These transplants can be artful, can enhance the living symphony of the New World.
Yes, the idea of America is forever entangled with the idea of the Garden of Eden. But we would miss the lesson entirely to leave the association there. It is not a garden of the past we are looking for, but a garden of the future; the Eden we search for is not something preserved, but something we can cultivate. Part of cultivating the promised land does involve forms of preservation— the old-growth forests we have left deserve the utmost protection, as they are not so easily replantable. Conservation is true conservatism. However, Americans too often have gotten caught up in chasing an imagined Eden of a perfect, virginal past— even when there has never been such a thing.
We’re like Jay Gatsby, trying to catch the clock, reaching out for that green light across the water, grasping for a past that can never be his again— a past that was never as real as he remembers it. Or Fitzgerald himself, as Nick, thinking of the moment sailors first set eyes on the green island of Manhattan, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” imagining man “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” It is because of this retrograde attitude that some Americans, like Fitzgerald, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But we need not beat only against the current; by accepting that the world will always warp and widen, we can learn to lean into the flow, go with the water, and make an art of our future from the course of our past.
The old Eden is unfindable, and even if we did find it, by our very contact we’d change it irrevocably; that’s what happened when the Clovis people hunted the North American megafauna to extinction 12,000 years ago, and it’s what happened when those first European sailors landed on the green New World with their dreams and unthinking pathogens. The history of contact, the history of the New World, is a history dripping with blood and violence. We cannot imagine away our context, the victories and failures of our ancestors, the environments they left us scarred with concrete. But we can imagine the Garden of the future emerging slowly from even the most wasted land. Life is incessant, and with time has reblossomed from worse decimation. The New World is a story of creation, destruction, and recreation; change is inescapable, so the pragmatic question for us is how we will change with the world. We ought to evolve in such a way as to encourage the world and ourselves to flower as widely as possible. These strong and smart hands learned to grasp the tree of life omnivorously, to hunt and gather and farm the face of the earth; by this very strength they can also be the gentle, skillful, nurturing hands of the greatest gardeners.
The island of Hawai’i is an even more representative example of the New World than America. It, too, is a garden, a continent in miniature with enough combinations of warmth, wind, water, and earth to host a huge amount of this planet’s diversity in one dense place. Everything can grow here; I remember waking up in the rainforest, climbing an avocado tree to grab breakfast, and supplementing it with Suriname cherries growing a short and soft barefoot walk away. The island’s singularity makes it a useful natural experiment in what a New World can be. 500,000 years ago, nothing lived on this sharp black rock in the sea. It is a fresher garden.
Every single living thing on Hawai’i came there from somewhere else, and relatively recently. Once upon a time, a geographical blink of an eye ago, a bird migrating from Oceania towards Alaska happened to spot a perfect little black pulloff above the water, somewhere to land and stretch his legs. As this little explorer scratched himself, a small living seed dropped out of his ruffled feathers into a crack in the harsh black rock of Earth’s newest skin. The descendants of this seed are many of the plants we now call native to Hawai’i. All species native to Hawai’i descend in flowering cascades from a few hitchhikers like this, birds and microbes and animals and humans that all originally immigrated to this island by chance or on purpose. They were not native; they became native. Nativity is, then, not some eternal category, some unchangeable noun. Nativity is more a verb; it is something one becomes.
We become more native over time by degrees, in proportion to the depth of our genuine dialogue with our environment. In genuine dialogue, we listen, and we participate; we find symbiosis. Nature makes itself at home. The environment changes as we change together. The garden gardens the gardener.
In dreaming of the New World together, we must believe that there are no hard lines of nativity, no categories of yes or no. Everything comes from somewhere else; everything has evolved from the same source; everything adapts. This reframe allows us to think more pragmatically about what it means to learn to live with one another on the same boat, the same island. In cultivating the garden, it’s not about invasive versus non-invasive, or native versus non-native. What matters is harmony. What matters is how a new neighbor adapts to the ecosystem. The best way to adapt is in such a way that promotes diversity rather than hinders it, creates more than it destroys.
For example, mongoose should probably never have been introduced to the Hawaiian ecosystem. They don’t fit in well; they didn’t mean to, but by eating all the vulnerable eggs of Hawai’i’s thousands of unique birds of paradise, we lost an unspeakable and unknowable number of unique species, irreplaceable branches of the same tree we grow from. This was tragic; we should mourn the birds; we should mourn the languages we’ll never learn. But better gardeners can learn from those mistakes. And, with an appreciative eye, we can notice how lovely it is that the bright purple jacaranda tree blossoms on the Kona side of the Big Island. From South Africa, the jacaranda reminds me of SoCal, of violet petals on the sidewalks of L.A. in the springtime, a surreal pop of indigo technicolor that makes the world a brighter place. I believe it is good that jacarandas are part of both gardens.
Reframing nativity as a gradient does not, of course, devalue the deeper nativity of a plant or a people who have been somewhere much, much longer. Time can do nothing but bring us closer to home. Hawai’i was one of the last places that homo sapiens discovered, about as far from Africa as people could row, just like the Americas were about as far from Africa as people could walk. The Menehune were the first people to find the islands. They made themselves at home not too long ago; then, even more recently, the Polynesians we now think of as ‘Native Hawaiians’ discovered the islands, decimating and oppressing the Menehune. Eventually, these Polynesians adjusted; they, too, made themselves at home; they, too, became native, and learned to speak a language that matches the wind and waves of Hawai’i. That language, those stories that grew a long time in this land, and the ways of living that learned to fit— these have much to teach us about how to live well with the garden we find ourselves within. We ought to honor the wisdom of those who’ve been somewhere longer than ourselves in order to find our place within the long story.
Hawaiians have a word, ‘kuleana’, which means a responsibility, privilege, right, or concern. For them, rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. We have a kuleana to mālama ʻāina, a responsibility to honor and care for the land, to be reciprocal with the world around us. When we have become truly part of the symphony of a place, we become children of the land, kamaʻāina. Regardless of the race of their ancestors, everyone who has lived in the New World for a long time can become a child of the land.
Between cracks in the harsh black lava rock of the New World grows the sacred o’hia tree. It is endemic to Hawai’i; it only evolved here. It is one of the most truly native forms of life on the island, because it evolved to be the first tree that can sprout on the newest land. It moves into the blank black canvas with ease, perfectly adapted to bring life to this lifeless land, to clear the way for many green things. The o’hia make life possible upon this volcano. It is a keystone species of the island, the first friend of the fact of rock, and it blossoms in beautiful red tendrils like the lava it loves. The o'hia blossom is the most perfect image I have yet found for the New World— a natural symbol, a wordless poem. When bees kiss the o’hia blossom, they make the most delicious honey I have ever tasted. It is the sweetness of the New World.
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