Our Hawaii — Key Ideas to Explore

Diction and the Tourist's Gaze

Charmian London's prose often adopts the tone of an informed visitor, blending wonder with cataloguing precision. She describes the Bishop Museum's exhibits with a collector's eye, noting 'the finely built and naked bronze statues that bore the kahilis' and contrasting them with 'clumsy, ill-dressed, commonplace bearers.' Her word choices—'bronze statues' for living men, 'sartorial disfigurements' for modern clothing—reveal a romanticized view of pre-contact Hawaii. She also records native speech, such as the saying 'You can always see the blood of an Hawaiian under his skin,' which she presents without commentary, letting the phrase carry its own cultural weight.

Voice and the Collaborative Narrative

The book's voice is not singular. Charmian's diary-like entries are interspersed with Jack London's more declarative essays. In the foreword, she quotes him saying of the American public, 'They don't know what they've got!'—a refrain that frames the entire work as an act of revelation. Her own voice is more observational, as when she describes a museum model of a heiau and notes a gruesome accident: a young Hawaiian repairman fell and 'his real blood was spilled—Fate his executioner, ilamuku.' The sudden shift to a Hawaiian term for 'executioner' adds a layer of cultural specificity, hinting at her effort to integrate local knowledge into her narrative.

Structure and the Embedded Essay

Charmian London explicitly states that Jack London's three articles are 'placed first, because of their peculiar value.' This structural decision gives his voice priority, making the book a hybrid: part memoir, part anthology. The foreword also explains that she 'eliminated the bulk of personal memoirs' to add 'more detail concerning the Territory of Hawaii.' The result is a text that moves between personal anecdote and encyclopedic description, as when she borrows Mary S. Lawrence's heraldic description of the Royal Hawaiian coat-of-arms, complete with its motto: 'The life of the land is perpetuated by righteousness.' Such inclusions suggest a desire to document as much as to narrate.

Recurring Details: Artifacts and Loss

Throughout the excerpts, Charmian London lingers on objects that signify cultural change. She notes that 'no tapa “cloth” is made in Hawaii to-day,' contrasting the 'almost transparent, paper-like tissue' of old with the 'handsome but heavy modern tapas of Samoa.' The Bishop Museum's wax figures are 'startlingly lifelike, except in the unavoidable deadness of the coloring.' These details accumulate into a quiet elegy for a vanishing way of life. Even the coat-of-arms, she observes, 'has not been used by the government since the islands have been a territory of the United States.' The book thus becomes a record of what is being lost, preserved in prose.

Readers approaching Our Hawaii should attend to the interplay between Charmian's diaristic eye and Jack's essayistic voice. The book is less a continuous narrative than a mosaic of observations, quotations, and descriptions. Pay attention to the moments when Charmian steps back to let a Hawaiian phrase or a museum exhibit speak for itself—these are the points where the text most clearly reveals its documentary ambition.

That rain fell in slow, silver sheets against the window while I drifted through Our Hawaii, the way Charmian London’s words made wet volcanic stone feel like a heartbeat. Later, I found myself wondering how places keep their stories buried, and that led me, almost sleepily, to The Blackmore Country — Context and Discussion, where the English moors seemed to hold their own quiet ghosts, equally patient.