Moloka’i
This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai’i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place---and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.
Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka’i. Here her life is supposed to end---but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.
With a vibrant cast of vividly realized characters, Moloka’i is the true-to-life chronicle of a people who embraced life in the face of death. Such is the warmth, humor, and compassion of this novel that "few readers will remain unchanged by Rachel's story" (mostlyfiction.com).
About Alan Brennert
Alan Brennert is the author of the best-selling historical novels Moloka’i and Honolulu, as well as the contemporary novels Time and Chance and Kindred Spirits. He has also written short stories, teleplays, screenplays, and the libretto of a stage musical, Weird Romance, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by David Spencer, which was produced in 1991 by WPA Theatre in New York and has since been licensed for over a hundred productions in the U.S. and abroad. He has developed screenplays for major studios, as well as miniseries, pilots, and television movies, earning both an Emmy and a People’s Choice Award for his work as a writer-producer for the television series L.A. Law. His short story Ma Qui was honored with a Nebula Award in 1992.
Born in Englewood, New Jersey, he has lived since 1973 in Southern California. He holds a Bachelor's degree in English from California State University at Long Beach, and also did graduate work in screenwriting at UCLA.
He has also contributed to such series as China Beach, Simon & Simon, and the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone. "But in television and film," he says, "sometimes your best work is never seen"—which eventually inspired him to write something that people would get to see, the novel of Moloka’i.
His latest novel, Honolulu, grew out of the research he did for Moloka’i. "One of the most colorful periods of modern Hawaiian history was the so-called 'glamour days' of the 1920s and 1930s," Alan explains. "This was a time period I couldn't really explore in depth in Moloka’i, since my main characters were in isolation at Kalaupapa. These were the years when Hawai'i made its deepest impression on the American consciousness: the years of Matson liners, the China Clipper, Hollywood celebrities vacationing in Honolulu, and the Hawai'i Calls radio show that broadcasted popular hapahaole music to the mainland. Yet at the same time this image of paradise was being presented to the American public, many Native Hawaiians and immigrants to Hawai'i labored on plantations for low wages or lived in poverty in Honolulu tenements. So Honolulu, the novel, is partly about this collision of image and reality...and how that reality was actually far richer and more captivating."
Visit the author at: www.alanbrennert.com.
Interview with the author
(courtesy of MacMillan Publishers)
Q: What inspired you to write Moloka'i?
A: In a roundabout way, it was a book by Harriet Doerr called Consider This, Señora — a wonderful novel about a group of expatriate Americans living in Mexico — which got me thinking about exploring the bonds of community in an exotic locale. Since I’ve been in love with Hawai'i for half my life, that seemed a natural choice. When I visited Moloka'i for the first time in 1995, I found it a unique and beautiful place, even for Hawai'i, and thought about setting a contemporary story there. But the more I researched Moloka'i, the more I learned about Kalaupapa and came to realize that this was the community I should be writing about.
Q: What prompted you to make your main character a woman?
A: The novel crystallized in my mind the moment I read that whenever residents of Kalaupapa had a child, that child had to be taken away from its parents, or else risk coming down with leprosy as well. In that instant, literally, I knew I would write about a young girl taken from her family, who grows up on Moloka'i, falls in love, gives birth to a child...and then has that child taken from her, even as she was taken from her own mother. I wanted to tell the story of the ordinary people who had to make such heartbreaking sacrifices. People torn from their home, their careers, who had to forge new lives for themselves under difficult circumstances. There were scores of books about Father Damien, but few about the patients who were sent to Moloka'i against their will. Damien was a great man, who did great good at great cost to himself...but because he was white, and a priest, his story commanded the world’s attention almost to the exclusion of all others at Kalaupapa. I think he’d find this as unjust as I do. In writing Moloka'i I felt that I was in some small way giving voice to those whose voices have been lost to time, and I hope they’d approve of what I’ve done.
Q: How did you go about your research?
A: At first I searched for a single book that would present a detailed overview of the history of Kalaupapa. No such luck: There was information out there, but scattered among hundreds of disparate sources—books, newspapers, magazine articles, and the files of the state archives. It took about a year before I could see Honolulu in the 1890s in my mind’s eye, including six months cobbling together a twenty-seven-page chronology of the settlement: the names of patients, administrators, doctors; the construction of buildings, the opening of stores—not merely pivotal events but the progression of everyday life at Kalaupapa. (When I mentioned what I’d done to the helpful librarians at the Bishop Museum, they asked for a copy for their archives; and I’m proud to say there’s one there now, along with a copy of Moloka'i.)
Q: Do you start from page one and go from there, or do you write a scene from later in the story and fit it in later?
A: I know some writers who can skip around, but I’m too linear for that; I have to start at the beginning and plow on through to the end. Still, I always knew that the story would end on the beach at Kalaupapa, with Rachel’s daughter looking out at the waves breaking on “the peaceful shore.” I even knew I’d use that exact phrase, in deliberate contrast to the line in the Robert Louis Stevenson poem. (I didn’t know, however, that Rachel’s granddaughter would also be there; she invited herself along later.)
Q: So do you find that your characters—as some writers claim—surprise you by doing things you hadn’t planned?
A: What writers usually mean is that you get to know your characters better in the course of writing about them, which may require some later adjustments. That happened to me with Rachel. Originally I considered having her move back to Kalaupapa at the end, as some patients did in real life; but by the time I reached that point in the story, she told me, “Forget it, pal! I’m staying on Maui with my sister.” It went against her character to go back after finding some of her family.
Q: What was it like to write from the point of view of a different culture?
A: I’ve gone to Hawai'i so often, and for so many years, that it feels like a second home to me. I’ve always been fascinated with its people, its history, and mythology...for me there was no greater joy than in reading and writing about it. Every day I got up and couldn’t wait to get started working on Moloka'i. It truly was a labor of love, and I hope that that love shows in the writing.
Reviews
Publishers Weekly, 9/1/2003
Compellingly original in its concept, Brennert's sweeping debut novel tracks the grim struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa. Rachel Kalama is the plucky, seven-year-old heroine whose family is devastated when first her uncle Pono and then she develop leprous sores and are quarantined with the disease. While Rachel's symptoms remain mild during her youth, she watches others her age dying from the disease in near total isolation from family and friends. Rachel finds happiness when she meets Kenji Utagawa, a fellow leprosy victim whose illness brings shame on his Japanese family. After a tender courtship, Rachel and Kenji marry and have a daughter, but the birth of their healthy baby brings as much grief as joy, when they must give her up for adoption to prevent infection. The couple cope with the loss of their daughter and settle into a productive working life until Kenji tries to stop a quarantined U.S. soldier from beating up his girlfriend and is tragically killed in the subsequent fight. The poignant concluding chapters portray Rachel's final years after sulfa drugs are discovered as a cure, leaving her free to abandon Moloka'i and seek out her family and daughter. Brennert's compassion makes Rachel a memorable character, and his smooth storytelling vividly brings early 20th-century Hawaii to life. Leprosy may seem a macabre subject, but Brennert transforms the material into a touching, lovely account of a woman's journey as she rises above the limitations of a devastating illness.
Kirkus Reviews , 9/1/2003
A gritty story of love and survival in a Hawaiian leper colony: more a portrait of old Hawaii than a compelling narrative. The chronicle of leprosy-infected Rachel Kalama begins in 1891 in Honolulu and ends in the late 1960s on isolated Moloka’i, site of the Kalaupapa Leprosy settlement. As much a record of her life as of the changes in Hawaii itself over the years, screenwriter and fantasy author Brennert (Her Pilgrim Soul, 1990, etc.) vividly and graphically details both the landscape and the disease as he tells Rachel’s story. She’s five at the start, when her father, a sailor, comes back in time for Christmas with another doll for her collection and gifts for her older siblings Sarah, Ben, and Kimo. A few months later, Rachel is found to have leprosy, and the happy life the family has enjoyed ends. Considered dangerously contagious, Rachel is sent to the settlement on Molaka’i. There, in a hospital run by Catholic nuns, she lives with other young girls affected in varying degrees. As the years pass, Rachel’s friends die; she befriends Sister Catherine, whose affection will sustain her; but, with the exception of her father, she has no contact with her family. Poor Rachel is doomed not only to suffer horribly but also to bear witness to history: a history that includes the end of the monarchy, the US annexation, the arrival of movies and airplanes, the Depression, and Pearl Harbor. Brennert also details changes in the treatment of leprosy—herbal injections, surgery, and, finally, the cure in the 1940’s: sulfa derivatives. While Hawaii changes, Rachel grows up, falls in love, and marries Kenji, a fellow patient. She bears a daughter, but Ruth must immediately give the child up for adoption to avoid infection. Amid the heartbreak, Kenji is murdered and Rachel’s symptoms worsen (she loses the fingers of her right hand). Rachel, though, is a survivor, and unexpected reunions compensate as she returns to a much-changed Honolulu. Not a comfortable read, but certainly instructive.
Selected Other Reviews
Chicago Tribune - "Alan Brennert draws on historical accounts of Kalaupapa and weaves in traditional Hawaiian stories and customs.... Moloka'i is the story of people who had much taken from them but also gained an unexpected new family and community in the process."
The Washington Post - "A dazzling historical saga."
Los Angeles Times - "A poignant story"
National Geographic Traveler - "[An] absorbing novel...Brennert evokes the evolution of—and hardships on—Moloka'i in engaging prose that conveys a strong sense of place."
Honolulu Star-Bulletin - "Moving and elegiac."
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