Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
I remember my first trip to Island. I was nineteen, on a layover, and my impression of the place was formed in the six hours it took to drink a sickly-sweet cocktail from a hollowed-out pineapple and buy a hibiscus-print shirt I would never wear again. It was a paradise, but a curiously thin one; a theme park of tropical bliss laid over something else, something I couldn’t see. It was a land that had learned, through long and bitter experience, how to present a smiling, vacant face to the world.
Kawai Strong Washburn’s novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviours, is about what lies beneath that face. It is a book that refuses to be a postcard. To call it a work of ‘magical realism’ is to commit a profound category error. This is not fantasy. This is a political manifesto disguised as a family saga, a declaration of war fought not with weapons, but with gods. Washburn’s central, shattering thesis is that for a colonised people, the revival of ancient magic is not an act of nostalgia; it is an act of spiritual and political insurgency.
The story is precipitated by a historical crime. On 7 July 1898, the United States formally annexed the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii. This was not, as the sanitised histories would have it, a gentle merger. It was an act of force, pushed through against the will of the 38,000 native Hawaiians who signed a petition in protest – a staggering number at the time. A nation was swallowed whole. And so it was done.
Washburn’s novel lives in the long, suppurating wound of that moment. He asks what becomes of a people whose land is turned into a playground for their conquerors, and whose very essence is declared obsolete. His answer is not a tale of quiet suffering. It is a story of how the old gods, dormant but never dead, begin to stir in response. The magic that permeates the book – a son who survives a shark attack only to be returned to his parents by the sharks themselves, a daughter who can make plants grow with her will – is not a literary device. It is a reawakening of a power that the coloniser cannot understand and therefore cannot control.
The Violence of a Lost Word
The primary weapon of the American occupation was not the gun, but the dictionary. Washburn makes this devastatingly clear in a passage that ought to be required reading in any study of postcolonialism. He describes the banning of the native language, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, and how this act was not merely censorship, but a form of ontological warfare. He zeroes in on the word pono:
‘…a word that encompasses feelings, and relationships, and objects, and the past, and the present, and the future, thousands of prayers at once, a word that is worth eighty-three words of the English language (virtue, morality, prosperity, excellence, values, resources, luck, necessity, hope, and so on and so forth)…’
When pono was forbidden, it was not one word that was lost, but an entire universe of meaning. The American project was not just to rule Hawaii, but to render it legible in English, to flatten its complex, interwoven reality into a series of manageable, soulless concepts. This is the whole game. This is how you kill a culture. You don’t burn the libraries; you rewrite all the books in a language that cannot contain their meaning.
To lose pono is not just to lose a word for ‘righteousness’. It is to lose the very framework that makes righteousness possible. Perhaps the only wildcard analogy that comes close is this: it is like asking a quantum physicist to explain entanglement using only the vocabulary of a sixteenth-century blacksmith. The concepts simply do not exist. The world itself shrinks. This linguistic violence is the precondition for the spiritual emptiness the natives see in the white tourists, whom they call haole. It means ‘breathless’. Not just foreign, but without spirit, without mana, without a soul.
A Liturgy of Resistance
The temptation, for the literary critic, is to file this neatly under ‘magical realism’ and move on. To compare it to Márquez or Rushdie, where the supernatural often serves as a metaphor for history’s absurdity or the unreliable nature of memory.
This is to miss the terrifying urgency of Washburn’s project. The magic here is not a metaphor. It is presented as a literal, functioning reality. It is a direct challenge to the rational, materialist worldview of the haole. When the gods of the land grant powers to the children of the Flores family, it is a strategic intervention. It is a re-arming. In a world where your language, your gods, and your way of life have been ‘forbidden’, the return of inexplicable power is the ultimate act of defiance. It is a force that cannot be annexed, legislated, or paved over for a new resort.
The tragedy of the Flores family is that they, too, have been partly colonised. They are caught between worlds. They send their magically gifted son, Nainoa, to the mainland for a good education. They want him to succeed in the American world, the world of money and opportunity. But this is like trying to cultivate a sacred, tropical plant in the sterile environment of a laboratory. The mana of the islands cannot survive in a land of the breathless. Nainoa’s journey is a heartbreaking exploration of this conflict: the attempt to reconcile an ancient, place-based power with the deracinated, soul-crushing demands of modern capitalism.
His is the central tragedy.
He is a bridge between two worlds, and the bridge is burning from both ends.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the novel seems to argue that this hybridity is impossible, a fatal compromise. The only path to survival, it suggests, is a radical return. A conscious decision to reject the haole world and re-root oneself in the sacred logic of the islands. This is not a quaint call to preserve heritage. It is a demand for decolonisation, not just of the land, but of the mind and the soul.
This is a book that will make many readers uncomfortable, as it should. It refuses to offer easy absolution. It does not allow the tourist to remain a tourist. It forces you to confront the violence that underpins the paradise, to understand that the mai tai you are sipping is mixed with the bitter tears of a displaced people.
Washburn, an eco-activist, knows that the health of the land and the health of the people are indivisible. The pollution of the beaches is mirrored by the pollution of the spirit. The magic of his characters is, in essence, a form of ecological and spiritual healing, a desperate, sacred act of self-defence. Sharks in the Time of Saviours is not a beautiful story about the magic of Hawaii. It is a story about the grim necessity of magic in a world that has tried to extinguish it. It is a lungful of sacred air in a world of the breathless. It is the soul’s insurgency, and its whispers are as powerful as any bomb.
