Unfamiliar Fishes in Oly Reads

Mar 01, 2011 jess rated it it was ok

Shelves: audiobook-d, 2011, nonfiction, 2019

2019: I visited Hawaii for the first time recently and many times I thought about this book (which is probably the first time I have thought about this book since I first read it in 2011). I am surprised to see that I seemed to hate it and gave it two stars in 2011. I felt more kindly and forgiving to the book this time around. I appreciated the distance Vowell traveled to research this book, and the depth of detail and nuance she brought to oft-repeated stories. I thought Vowell did a good job 2019: I visited Hawaii for the first time recently and many times I thought about this book (which is probably the first time I have thought about this book since I first read it in 2011). I am surprised to see that I seemed to hate it and gave it two stars in 2011. I felt more kindly and forgiving to the book this time around. I appreciated the distance Vowell traveled to research this book, and the depth of detail and nuance she brought to oft-repeated stories. I thought Vowell did a good job of showing how Hawaii was leveraged in the larger geopolitical happenings of the time. I was also more interested in how she was able to relate her Cherokee family's experiences (trail of tears, illegal treaties, leaders making bad deals for personal benefit, etc) with those of the Hawaiian people. I thought the Haole looked sufficient stupid and crooked with direct quotes and cited documentation, without personal commentary from Vowell. It is interesting to read books you read a long time ago and see how different (or the same) you feel. I was also frequently nostalgic for the time period when we had a Hawaiian US president.

2011: Unfamiliar Fishes is Sarah Vowell's take on the history of Hawaii. Vowell recounts the unraveling of the warrior kings, the arrival of the first missionaries, and all the way up to the end of the Hawaiian nation when Queen Liliuokalani was removed from her throne, the provisional government was established and Sanford Dole became president of the Republic of Hawaii. Then the country was annexed by the US. It is supposed to be the story of how we imported "our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second-favorite religion, Christianity."

This passage really stuck with me, and carried me through the book. The idea of Hawaii as a sort of canary in the coal mine of American imperialism and conquest drew me through the pages. I wanted point, evidence, counterpoint to support this narrative. This quote is from the second page.

I started looking into Hawaii's bit part in the epic of American global domination. I came across a political cartoon on the cover of Harper's Weekly from August 27, 1898. Above the caption, "Uncle Sam's New Class in the Art of Self-Government," Uncle Sam poses as a schoolmaster in a classroom festooned with a world map in which little American flags are planted on the barely visible island dots of Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba & the Philippines. A barefoot, frowning boy wearing a dunce cap labeled "Aguinaldo" represents the Filipino revolutionary who began the Spanish-American War as an American ally against Spain; but after Spain surrendered and handed over the Phillipines to the United States, Aguinaldo led the guerilla war against his new American colonizers. Uncle Sam is trying to break up a fight between two other barefoot boys, one wearing a satchel marked "Cuban Ex-Patriot" and the other a belt marked "Guerilla" meant to symbolize the unruly discontentment of Cuban freedom fighers also dismayed that their American allies in the fight against Spain for Cuba libre had just become their new colonial overlord. Meanwhile, off to the side, two good little girls, their headdresses identifying them as "Hawaii" and "Porto Rico," have their noses in the books they are quietly reading. Presumably because well-behaved Hawaii & Puerto Rico have politely and graciously accepted the blessings of annexation without any back talk.

See? That's good. But the book gets caught up in churchy Puritans and fails in what I wanted/expected.

There are several references to Barack Obama, America's first Plate Lunch President. It seems pretty obvious that Obama is an important factor in both the writing and the reading of this book, but I'll say it anyway. He's the cultural touchstone that lends this book relevancy.

Sarah Vowell is a polarizing author and you usually love her or hate her. Generally I appreciate her work. But this book fell short on several things I love about her writing. Despite her meticulous research and humor, something is missing. Vowell has a nuanced understanding of the political, cultural, economic, religious and contradictory events of Hawaiian history, but there is no counterpoint to the elimination of the culture & ethnicity of the islands. There is no silver lining. What good came from this? Where is the justifiable outrage? Instead, you get a sort of grumbling, complacent indignation. Even the trademark snarky humor serves to turn atrocities into punch lines instead of skewering the perpetrators. The white people who handed over the nation to the US may have been morally bankrupt and motivated by greed, but they were not, in the strictest sense, doing anything illegal. They didn't break the law, Sarah Vowell tells us, because they wrote the law themselves. And maybe that's just how it had to go, after the Hawaiians gave up taro cultivation, the monarchy and the hula. They got a written language. Besides, the Puritans had lived there for generations, so they were Hawaiian too.

That was so totally not the conclusion I thought we were going to come to.

Ultimately, this book could have been a lot of things, but it just wasn't. Above all, I read Sarah Vowell for fun in my free time, as nerdy as that sounds, and this book most certainly was not fun to read. ...more

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Oct 13, 2011 Leonardo Etcheto rated it really liked it

Really liked the style of the book – written in a semi-rambling conversational style that I found quite engaging. Like an extended chat with the author. She did a good job of bouncing from the present to the past and back.
The book talks about the transition Hawaii underwent after western contact (Captain Cook and his death) to annexation by the USA. I am fascinated that upon contact Kamehameha unified the islands by force, using guns and cannons, but that his descendents did not maintain enoug ...more

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