I fail to see what China and India should have a conflict about ITTL. And after this sort of war, depending of what happens to the Chinese political structure, you might well see a rapprochement with Russia on the lines of what happened between France and Germany post 1945 IOTL (or for that matter, post 1900 ITTL). Of course, it might go also the way of Sino-Japanese relationships IOTL, although I'd argue that the Cold War was quite a major factor there.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I fail to see what China and India should have a conflict about ITTL. And after this sort of war, depending of what happens to the Chinese political structure, you might well see a rapprochement with Russia on the lines of what happened between France and Germany post 1945 IOTL (or for that matter, post 1900 ITTL). Of course, it might go also the way of Sino-Japanese relationships IOTL, although I'd argue that the Cold War was quite a major factor there.
This is a chilling quote, in a good way. You (or Adams) struck a chord here.
(Comment written right after a interesting conversation with my students to sort of the same general effect).
Honolulu, March 1960
The Tourist:
“Did you come here when you were a sailor?” asked Mariko.
“None of this was here then.” Omar looked down the Waikiki strip at the hotels, the shops, the sidewalk vendors, the wealthy families playing on the beach. "This was a sailors’ town in those days. Now, once you get past the harbor, it’s offices and hotels.”
It was uncanny, he thought, how much a city could change in fifty years. Tokyo had done the same, but he’d seen that day to day, and change was much more familiar when it came slowly. Honolulu was a place he didn’t recognize: it seemed that the old town had been razed to the ground and a new one built on its ashes.
Even the people were different. In Omar’s sailing days, there had been Hawaiians and haoles, along with Malay merchants and those few East Asian and Indian plantation workers who’d settled in the towns after finishing their indentures. Now… there were Hawaiians still, but more often there were Hawaiian features on faces that carried the mark of other continents. The Asians were no longer few, and they’d been joined by Africans, and it was far from rare for Europe, Asia, Africa and Hawaii to be combined in one person. As he watched people pass on the street, he could imagine a slow blending of nationalities: maybe, in a century or two, everyone here would again be of the Hawaiian race, but it would be a different one from what Captain Cook had found.
He’d imagined many things about returning to Hawaii: showing Mariko his old haunts, watching native dances in the evening, renewing his acquaintance with the music and food. What he’d never imagined was that he’d be a stranger.
“If it helps,” Mariko said, “I’m even more of one than you.” Maybe Omar had spoken out loud – it was a hazard of old age – or maybe, as she often did after so many years, his wife had read the thoughts on his face. And it was so. Micronesia had been easy for Mariko: it might be an autonomous state now, but the stamp of Japan was everywhere, and even on Yap and Kosrae, everyone had spoken Japanese. Here, even the Japanese people were losing the language: most of them spoke enough to deal with the tourists, but Hawaiian was the only language everyone had in common, and they’d got in the habit of speaking it. And for Mariko, who knew just a few words of Hawaiian and had rarely left Japan, the idea of Japanese shopkeepers who spoke to her in a foreign language was unsettling.
But it hadn’t been much less so for Omar himself. He did remember most of his Hawaiian, but the language had changed almost as much as the city. People spoke it faster now, and it was laced with words they’d borrowed from the immigrants: he recognized French and Japanese words here and there, and surprisingly one or two from Wolof, but most of them he didn’t understand. Ordering lunch had turned into an exercise that was half comedy and half dumb show, with hand gestures bridging the gap between his archaic Hawaiian and the vendor’s bad Japanese.
They’d done it in the end, though. Mariko got saimin with greens and eggs and fufu dumplings, while Omar bought the day’s thali: Portuguese sausage, curried mashed potatoes, cauliflower with yogurt and spices, and a pineapple salad. And as they sat and drank lemonade and watched people pass in colorful clothes, it seemed to Omar that his wife was feeling more at home. Maybe they’d go up to Diamond Head later and get a look around, if he could still manage it at their age, and tomorrow morning they’d go swimming…
The gunshots that followed weren’t the first Omar had heard in Honolulu: in a busy port full of sailors from all nations, things like that happened sometimes. But in this Honolulu, fifty-odd years later, they seemed as out of place as a fission bomb. He heard another shot and saw a man topple from a chair, and then saw another running away.
There was nothing he could do about the latter: at eighty, he’d never catch the man. But for the former, the instincts of an old soldier and an old surgeon both pointed the same direction. “I’m a doctor,” he called, hoping that he had the Hawaiian words right, and wondered if this was a bad omen for the rest of their vacation.
The Cop:
Charlie Razak was walking a beat when he heard the shots, and sprinted toward the beachfront plaza from which they’d come. The lunch crowd had mostly scattered by the time he got there, and whoever had fired the gun was long gone: only a few people remained, surrounding an old man with West African features and a Japanese woman about ten years younger. The two of them were tying a bandage on the victim, a heavy-set man of about fifty.
“He’ll live if you get him to a hospital,” the old man said; his Hawaiian was good, even if it sounded like what Charlie’s grandfather would have spoken.
Charlie knelt down and examined where the bullet had been extracted and the wound stitched up. “You did a good job.”
“I learned field medicine in the big war, and I was a surgeon in the Japanese army in Korea in the forties. Gunshot wounds are nothing new to me.” The old man paused for breath. “Someone getting shot on the beach in broad daylight, on the other hand…”
“Yeah. That doesn’t happen much, not around here. Maybe up mauka or out by Wai Nomi, but the gangs mostly keep their business at home. He doesn’t look like a gangster, either.” There was something naggingly familiar about the victim, but Charlie wasn’t sure what it was. “Anyone know him?”
“No, he was just having lunch,” one of the bystanders said. “He never said a word. It seemed like he was waiting for someone, though – I saw him look at his watch a couple times, and then look out at the street.”
“Wait a minute,” said another. “Isn’t he running for parliament up by Wahiawa?”
“Yeah, that’s Joe Kahele, I think.”
All at once Charlie remembered the name. Kahele was a central valley man, with some British and Chinese along with Hawaiian blood, and he’d been knocking around the city and district councils for a few years. Now he wanted to move up – and the way he was making a name was by taking on the Kanaka Church. The man had enemies, all right. What he, and they, were doing here, though…
“Anyone see who did it?”
That got Charlie a description. The trouble is, it got him a lot of descriptions, none of them matching except in broad details. The gunman was at least hapa-Hawaiian, and by most accounts he was young, but his features and clothing were anyone’s guess, and he’d probably have ditched the clothes by now anyway. Even the old doctor, who was probably the best observer in the group, hadn’t seen much.
“Well, fair enough. Anyone remembers anything later, leave me a message at the Diamond Head barracks.” He waited for the answering nods, and then he waited for the ambulance. Hopefully, when they brought Kahele around – if they brought him around – he’d have something to say.
In the meantime, Charlie needed to take a trip up the valley.
The Candidate:
The road to Wahiawa went through farm country. On one side, there were vast sugar and pineapple plantations and macadamia orchards, run by foreign companies and worked by dirt-poor contract laborers. On the other side, there were the Hawaiians – pure ones, mostly, not the mixed kind that was common in Honolulu – trying to get by growing taro. This was Kanaka Church country, and it was easy to see why: the Hawaiians owned the land, but none of them were getting rich. The government had managed to raise the rent on the plantation leases to something approaching market, but it all went to the alii, not to the people scratching out a living on the hillsides.
Wahiawa town was different. The signs were all in Hawaiian – the language laws the Kanaka people had pushed through in the forties were enforced much more strictly here than where the tourists and foreign businessmen went – but it wasn’t the mother tongue of many of the town’s residents. Their parents had all been contract workers, and they clustered in neighborhoods; window signs advertised that Hindustani was spoken in one store and Bahasa Nusantara in another. They were allowed to do that, as long as the signs themselves were in Hawaiian – it was their way of thumbing their nose at a law they clearly resented.
This wasn’t Kanaka Church country – the church’s program pitted the Hawaiian poor against the immigrant poor, and these were the people on the other side. Charlie could see how Joe Kahele might pick up a following here. He could also see how someone from the valley outside might have lured him to his death in Honolulu.
He parked his fiacre on the central street that had become known as Church Row because people had kept building houses of worship there. The Malay mosque, the kind Charlie went to most Fridays, was at one end, and the Tahitian Ahmadi one – far more ornate in its wood-carving and radical in its theology – was close by. The Methodists and Congregationalists were cheek by jowl with the Catholics and Mormons, and the Hindu and Sikh mandirs were across the street. Some town planner had thought putting all the churches in the same place would encourage people to live together, but to Charlie it all seemed like a recipe for holy war. At least the battlefield wouldn’t be large.
Speaking of which, at the intersection with Kamehameha Avenue, standing like a fortress in enemy territory, was the Kanaka Church.
It took four or five minutes before they left Charlie in, even after he showed his badge; he could hear someone inside calling to confirm his credentials. The man who finally opened the door was polite enough, though, and apologized for the wait: “unfortunately, there are people here who don’t like us.”
“Are you surprised? The people in this town are the ones you want to send home.”
“You don’t think we mean that physically, do you? How would we even do that – would my Hawaiian half send home my German half?” Charlie noticed for the first time that his interlocutor was indeed hapa-haole – twenty years ago, the Kanaka Church would never have let him become a member. “We should send our foreign selves home spiritually – even those with no Hawaiian blood at all can become native heart and soul.” His Hawaiian, Charlie also noticed, was like the popolo doctor’s – the kind the alii spoke a hundred years ago, without so many foreign words.
Maybe that was his way of practicing what he preached. But from some of the speeches Charlie had listened to, and from the fights between Kanaka people and the people in his neighborhood when he was young, he wasn’t sure all the church leaders were that metaphorical. He’d also never understood why his Malay side, and his French one for that matter, were something he needed to send home. But he wasn’t here to argue politics. “I need to speak to Kelly Palakiko,” he said.
“That would be me.”
Things really had changed in the Kanaka Church, if its parliamentary candidate was half-German. But maybe that proved their point: there seemed to be a lot fewer pure Hawaiians than there’d been when Charlie was a kid.
“We’ll go upstairs,” Palakiko was saying. “We should talk in private.”
Well, at least he wasn’t refusing. Charlie let Palakiko lead him past a dining hall where the men were eating and another one, close to the kitchen, for the women. The smell of pork came from the one but not the other – the Kanaka Church had become stricter even as the pure Hawaiian population declined, and these days they wanted to restore the old kapus that Ka’ahumanu had abolished. The crosses in back of the Pele stone, and the clothes as modest as any missionary could ask for, said that they hadn’t got rid of everything foreign, but maybe Christianity was one of those things that had got so far into the Hawaiian soul that it couldn’t really be sent home. He’d save that question for another day too.
They reached a plain-looking office on the top floor, with a chair behind the desk and two in front of it; Palakiko didn’t take any of them, and neither did Charlie. “So tell me,” the candidate said, “what we need to talk about.”
“Your opponent in the election got shot in Honolulu about two hours ago. Do you know anything about that?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“People said he was waiting for someone. Was it one of your people? Were you going to make a deal?” Pacts between parliamentary candidates were standard – each would promise, if they won, to give the other a job or steer some lucrative contracts. Nearly all the winners played, because they never knew when they’d need the same favor.
“I’ve been here all day. There are thirty or forty people who can tell you that.”
“I didn’t say it was you personally,” Charlie answered. “And just for the record, he lived. Tourist doctor patched him up, said he should be up to talking by tomorrow. So I can check.”
Palakiko looked uncomfortable. “Yes, there was a meeting scheduled,” he said. “But it was between my people and his. He wasn’t supposed to be there personally.”
“I’m not sure I believe that. I think you did know he’d be there, and that you didn’t really want to make a deal with him. That kind of thing happens between ordinary politicians, but not with someone who’s set himself up against your church, right? Maybe, after the fight on the Wahiawa road last week, you decided to kill him.”
“You’re making that up, Officer.”
“Am I? All right, then, who else would have done it? What enemies did he have?”
“I don’t know – everyone? He was in dirty business up to his ears – he sold licenses and planning permits, and not everyone cared for it. Maybe one of the triads got to him, or the Madras mafia.”
“Good point, except the one who shot him was kanaka.”
“There are Hawaiians who work for all the gangs, Officer. You know that better than I do.”
“As muscle, but not as shooters. They only trust their own with that.”
“Maybe he was hapa-pake. We’re all one people these days, aren’t we?”
That was a better point than Charlie wanted to admit, which meant that he didn’t dare admit it. “You’ll have to do better, Kelly.”
“Anyone could have been angry at him. You say a kanaka did it? Maybe he was someone who was tired of people like Kahele selling out to the foreigners to get a place in the office buildings where no one from the taro fields will ever work. Maybe he was angry at Kahele for trying to repeal the laws that keep us from being totally submerged in a country where we’re already a minority.”
That, too, was a point. As long as Charlie could recall, the Hawaiians had been fighting for their future, and taking a step back for every one forward. But the contract workers wanted a future too, and so had people like Charlie’s grandfather.
“Do you know anyone in particular who feels that way? Anyone who’s said so, for instance?”
“If I did, do you think I’d tell you?”
“Well, if not, you’re suspect number one.”
“I guess I’ll have to be, then. Because there’s no such person.”
Charlie had never been one of those people who believed he had a magic power to spot liars. That was for the kahunas; cops had to go on evidence. But he knew now, with as much certainty as he’d ever known anything, that Palakiko was lying.
The Prayer:
Ahmed Ka’aukai was the caretaker of the Ahmadi mosque, and he was sweeping the floor when the police officer came in. He waited patiently – that was what he always did with cops. Let them say what they want. Don’t blurt something out that they might not have known they were looking for.
“Charlie Razak,” the policeman said, showing a badge. “Need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Sit down, then.” Ahmed motioned to a chair, but continued to keep his patience.
The silence lengthened, but only for a minute. “Were you at the fight outside of town last week?”
“Most of us were. They were planning to come burn our stores.”
“All right. Did anyone seem like the leader?”
“Other than Palakiko, you mean?”
“Other than him. Was there someone leading the people from the taro fields?”
Ahmed’s conscience warred within himself for a moment. The walls of the mosque were thick with carvings of field workers struggling for justice and stories of mutual aid. The contract workers and peddlers and small shopkeepers survived on that. The subsistence farmers wanted the same thing – they just didn’t know who their enemy really was.
“What makes you think I know who their leaders are?”
“Because the ones who don’t go to the Kanaka Church or the missionary churches out in the country come here. Because they know.”
But Ahmed had only been playing for time to decide, and he’d heard there had been an attempted murder. “Yes, there was one. Pa’ahana. He works for the Kanaka people at elections, and he’s very militant. More so than the church leaders, most of the time – he believes in all the things they say they don’t really mean. He gets in a lot of fights, and this wasn’t the first one.”
The cop leaned in. “Do you think he’d know if Palakiko and Kahele had a meeting planned?”
“He was at the church almost every day, on some errand or another. He and Palakiko were close. I can’t imagine he wouldn’t know.”
“And did he…”
“Talk about revenge for the fight? Or the speech Kahele made afterward, where he called his own people dogs? Oh, I can’t say for sure. But someone did say, an hour or two ago, that he was on his way to the pu’uhonua.”
The officer nodded in sudden understanding. In ancient times, those who had broken the kapus could escape death if they made it to the pu’uhonua – the places of refuge. Now, wanted criminals went there – it wasn’t strictly forbidden to make arrests in the pu’uhonua, but the mob would rise up against any officer who did, especially if the crime in question was political. And there was one in Kualoa Valley, beyond the mountains on the windward side.
“He can’t stay there for long,” Charlie said, but Ahmed knew he didn’t believe that. There was a community of outlaws there, and the land was fertile, and as long as they didn’t stray outside the valley, they could stay as long as they wanted.
“Maybe I can talk him out,” Ahmed answered. Even as he said that, he wasn’t sure why he’d done so. This wasn’t anything he was obliged to take on himself, and nothing that really concerned him. Maybe he wanted the police to owe him a favor – everyone wanted that, didn’t they? Or maybe he wanted to keep the peace between the Muslim and Kanaka families in the taro fields. Maybe he wanted to run for parliament himself one day, as an alternative to both the Hawaiian chauvinists and those like Kahele who despised their own ancestors. Maybe he wanted all Hawaii to be like Honolulu had become.
“Go ahead, if you want. I’m going back to the barracks and putting a notice out on him. Not much else I can do when he’s gone to Kualoa.” The officer turned to walk out with a distinctly frustrated look.
“No, Charlie, why don’t you come with me? People like him want to be heard. If you’re there to hear him, it’ll mean a lot.”
So they drove north in Ahmed’s fiacre, past more plantations and subsistence farms and small towns full of tumbledown houses. Kualoa was only twenty or twenty-two kilometers from Wahiawa as the crow flew, but there were no roads straight over the mountains, so the trip was much longer. The sun was grazing the mountain ridges to the west when the Coast Road finally brought them to the valley’s threshold.
There was a makeshift checkpoint there, and Ahmed walked up to it. “I’m looking for Pa’ahana,” he said. “Is he in there?”
“You know we don’t keep track,” answered the officer inside. “We just make sure they don’t come out. You want him, go in and call him.”
Ahmed left his car behind and crossed the boundary. “Pa’ahana!” he called, and the name echoed from the mountainside.
He hadn’t really expected an answer, but he got one. “You found me,” came a young man’s shout. It didn’t seem like the shout of a fugitive.
“I want to talk to you.”
“About what? Coming out and taking my punishment like a man?”
“You didn’t kill him, you know. They won’t hang you. You’ll get to tell your story in court , for the papers and everyone, and you’ll be out in a few years. Better than staying here while everyone forgets you, no?”
“He didn’t die?”
He must have fled as soon as he fired the shots, Ahmed realized, and he didn’t stay for news. “No, he didn’t. A popolo doctor was there and stitched him up. They say he’ll live.”
The young man standing above them on the cliffside said nothing for a long moment. “The sacrifice failed, then.”
“Sacrifice?” It was the cop, rather than Ahmed, who spoke.
“Yes. Kahele was my sacrifice to Kāne. An offering to drive the foreigners out. Traitors like him are the ones who brought the haoles and the pake and the popolo here in the first place. They’re the sacrifice we have to make if we want to be free again.”
Ahmed had heard that said before, in sermons and speeches. “They didn’t mean that literally, you know.”
“Who cares what they meant? Kahele was my offering. And if that sacrifice failed, I need to make another one. O Kāne, deliver our land back to us, make our people masters of their destiny again rather than starvelings living on foreigners’ mercy, make us pure of blood and heart as we were before…”
I can agree with most of that, Ahmed thought. Purity of blood is an evil obsession, but justice for them – for us…
So deeply was he listening to the prayer’s words that he realized too late what sacrifice the feather-clad man on the cliffside intended to make. “No!” he shouted as Pa’ahana prepared to jump, and he started running up the steep path to the bluffs, but he was less than halfway there before the young man disappeared off the edge of the cliff. By the time Ahmed could look where Pa’ahana had gone, there was only a vanishing ripple in the water to mark where the offering had been made.
The Tourist:
“Did you come here when you were a sailor?” asked Mariko.
“None of this was here then.” Omar looked down the Waikiki strip at the hotels, the shops, the sidewalk vendors, the wealthy families playing on the beach. "This was a sailors’ town in those days. Now, once you get past the harbor, it’s offices and hotels.”
It was uncanny, he thought, how much a city could change in fifty years. Tokyo had done the same, but he’d seen that day to day, and change was much more familiar when it came slowly. Honolulu was a place he didn’t recognize: it seemed that the old town had been razed to the ground and a new one built on its ashes.
Even the people were different. In Omar’s sailing days, there had been Hawaiians and haoles, along with Malay merchants and those few East Asian and Indian plantation workers who’d settled in the towns after finishing their indentures. Now… there were Hawaiians still, but more often there were Hawaiian features on faces that carried the mark of other continents. The Asians were no longer few, and they’d been joined by Africans, and it was far from rare for Europe, Asia, Africa and Hawaii to be combined in one person. As he watched people pass on the street, he could imagine a slow blending of nationalities: maybe, in a century or two, everyone here would again be of the Hawaiian race, but it would be a different one from what Captain Cook had found.
He’d imagined many things about returning to Hawaii: showing Mariko his old haunts, watching native dances in the evening, renewing his acquaintance with the music and food. What he’d never imagined was that he’d be a stranger.
“If it helps,” Mariko said, “I’m even more of one than you.” Maybe Omar had spoken out loud – it was a hazard of old age – or maybe, as she often did after so many years, his wife had read the thoughts on his face. And it was so. Micronesia had been easy for Mariko: it might be an autonomous state now, but the stamp of Japan was everywhere, and even on Yap and Kosrae, everyone had spoken Japanese. Here, even the Japanese people were losing the language: most of them spoke enough to deal with the tourists, but Hawaiian was the only language everyone had in common, and they’d got in the habit of speaking it. And for Mariko, who knew just a few words of Hawaiian and had rarely left Japan, the idea of Japanese shopkeepers who spoke to her in a foreign language was unsettling.
But it hadn’t been much less so for Omar himself. He did remember most of his Hawaiian, but the language had changed almost as much as the city. People spoke it faster now, and it was laced with words they’d borrowed from the immigrants: he recognized French and Japanese words here and there, and surprisingly one or two from Wolof, but most of them he didn’t understand. Ordering lunch had turned into an exercise that was half comedy and half dumb show, with hand gestures bridging the gap between his archaic Hawaiian and the vendor’s bad Japanese.
They’d done it in the end, though. Mariko got saimin with greens and eggs and fufu dumplings, while Omar bought the day’s thali: Portuguese sausage, curried mashed potatoes, cauliflower with yogurt and spices, and a pineapple salad. And as they sat and drank lemonade and watched people pass in colorful clothes, it seemed to Omar that his wife was feeling more at home. Maybe they’d go up to Diamond Head later and get a look around, if he could still manage it at their age, and tomorrow morning they’d go swimming…
The gunshots that followed weren’t the first Omar had heard in Honolulu: in a busy port full of sailors from all nations, things like that happened sometimes. But in this Honolulu, fifty-odd years later, they seemed as out of place as a fission bomb. He heard another shot and saw a man topple from a chair, and then saw another running away.
There was nothing he could do about the latter: at eighty, he’d never catch the man. But for the former, the instincts of an old soldier and an old surgeon both pointed the same direction. “I’m a doctor,” he called, hoping that he had the Hawaiian words right, and wondered if this was a bad omen for the rest of their vacation.
*******
The Cop:
Charlie Razak was walking a beat when he heard the shots, and sprinted toward the beachfront plaza from which they’d come. The lunch crowd had mostly scattered by the time he got there, and whoever had fired the gun was long gone: only a few people remained, surrounding an old man with West African features and a Japanese woman about ten years younger. The two of them were tying a bandage on the victim, a heavy-set man of about fifty.
“He’ll live if you get him to a hospital,” the old man said; his Hawaiian was good, even if it sounded like what Charlie’s grandfather would have spoken.
Charlie knelt down and examined where the bullet had been extracted and the wound stitched up. “You did a good job.”
“I learned field medicine in the big war, and I was a surgeon in the Japanese army in Korea in the forties. Gunshot wounds are nothing new to me.” The old man paused for breath. “Someone getting shot on the beach in broad daylight, on the other hand…”
“Yeah. That doesn’t happen much, not around here. Maybe up mauka or out by Wai Nomi, but the gangs mostly keep their business at home. He doesn’t look like a gangster, either.” There was something naggingly familiar about the victim, but Charlie wasn’t sure what it was. “Anyone know him?”
“No, he was just having lunch,” one of the bystanders said. “He never said a word. It seemed like he was waiting for someone, though – I saw him look at his watch a couple times, and then look out at the street.”
“Wait a minute,” said another. “Isn’t he running for parliament up by Wahiawa?”
“Yeah, that’s Joe Kahele, I think.”
All at once Charlie remembered the name. Kahele was a central valley man, with some British and Chinese along with Hawaiian blood, and he’d been knocking around the city and district councils for a few years. Now he wanted to move up – and the way he was making a name was by taking on the Kanaka Church. The man had enemies, all right. What he, and they, were doing here, though…
“Anyone see who did it?”
That got Charlie a description. The trouble is, it got him a lot of descriptions, none of them matching except in broad details. The gunman was at least hapa-Hawaiian, and by most accounts he was young, but his features and clothing were anyone’s guess, and he’d probably have ditched the clothes by now anyway. Even the old doctor, who was probably the best observer in the group, hadn’t seen much.
“Well, fair enough. Anyone remembers anything later, leave me a message at the Diamond Head barracks.” He waited for the answering nods, and then he waited for the ambulance. Hopefully, when they brought Kahele around – if they brought him around – he’d have something to say.
In the meantime, Charlie needed to take a trip up the valley.
*******
The Candidate:
The road to Wahiawa went through farm country. On one side, there were vast sugar and pineapple plantations and macadamia orchards, run by foreign companies and worked by dirt-poor contract laborers. On the other side, there were the Hawaiians – pure ones, mostly, not the mixed kind that was common in Honolulu – trying to get by growing taro. This was Kanaka Church country, and it was easy to see why: the Hawaiians owned the land, but none of them were getting rich. The government had managed to raise the rent on the plantation leases to something approaching market, but it all went to the alii, not to the people scratching out a living on the hillsides.
Wahiawa town was different. The signs were all in Hawaiian – the language laws the Kanaka people had pushed through in the forties were enforced much more strictly here than where the tourists and foreign businessmen went – but it wasn’t the mother tongue of many of the town’s residents. Their parents had all been contract workers, and they clustered in neighborhoods; window signs advertised that Hindustani was spoken in one store and Bahasa Nusantara in another. They were allowed to do that, as long as the signs themselves were in Hawaiian – it was their way of thumbing their nose at a law they clearly resented.
This wasn’t Kanaka Church country – the church’s program pitted the Hawaiian poor against the immigrant poor, and these were the people on the other side. Charlie could see how Joe Kahele might pick up a following here. He could also see how someone from the valley outside might have lured him to his death in Honolulu.
He parked his fiacre on the central street that had become known as Church Row because people had kept building houses of worship there. The Malay mosque, the kind Charlie went to most Fridays, was at one end, and the Tahitian Ahmadi one – far more ornate in its wood-carving and radical in its theology – was close by. The Methodists and Congregationalists were cheek by jowl with the Catholics and Mormons, and the Hindu and Sikh mandirs were across the street. Some town planner had thought putting all the churches in the same place would encourage people to live together, but to Charlie it all seemed like a recipe for holy war. At least the battlefield wouldn’t be large.
Speaking of which, at the intersection with Kamehameha Avenue, standing like a fortress in enemy territory, was the Kanaka Church.
It took four or five minutes before they left Charlie in, even after he showed his badge; he could hear someone inside calling to confirm his credentials. The man who finally opened the door was polite enough, though, and apologized for the wait: “unfortunately, there are people here who don’t like us.”
“Are you surprised? The people in this town are the ones you want to send home.”
“You don’t think we mean that physically, do you? How would we even do that – would my Hawaiian half send home my German half?” Charlie noticed for the first time that his interlocutor was indeed hapa-haole – twenty years ago, the Kanaka Church would never have let him become a member. “We should send our foreign selves home spiritually – even those with no Hawaiian blood at all can become native heart and soul.” His Hawaiian, Charlie also noticed, was like the popolo doctor’s – the kind the alii spoke a hundred years ago, without so many foreign words.
Maybe that was his way of practicing what he preached. But from some of the speeches Charlie had listened to, and from the fights between Kanaka people and the people in his neighborhood when he was young, he wasn’t sure all the church leaders were that metaphorical. He’d also never understood why his Malay side, and his French one for that matter, were something he needed to send home. But he wasn’t here to argue politics. “I need to speak to Kelly Palakiko,” he said.
“That would be me.”
Things really had changed in the Kanaka Church, if its parliamentary candidate was half-German. But maybe that proved their point: there seemed to be a lot fewer pure Hawaiians than there’d been when Charlie was a kid.
“We’ll go upstairs,” Palakiko was saying. “We should talk in private.”
Well, at least he wasn’t refusing. Charlie let Palakiko lead him past a dining hall where the men were eating and another one, close to the kitchen, for the women. The smell of pork came from the one but not the other – the Kanaka Church had become stricter even as the pure Hawaiian population declined, and these days they wanted to restore the old kapus that Ka’ahumanu had abolished. The crosses in back of the Pele stone, and the clothes as modest as any missionary could ask for, said that they hadn’t got rid of everything foreign, but maybe Christianity was one of those things that had got so far into the Hawaiian soul that it couldn’t really be sent home. He’d save that question for another day too.
They reached a plain-looking office on the top floor, with a chair behind the desk and two in front of it; Palakiko didn’t take any of them, and neither did Charlie. “So tell me,” the candidate said, “what we need to talk about.”
“Your opponent in the election got shot in Honolulu about two hours ago. Do you know anything about that?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“People said he was waiting for someone. Was it one of your people? Were you going to make a deal?” Pacts between parliamentary candidates were standard – each would promise, if they won, to give the other a job or steer some lucrative contracts. Nearly all the winners played, because they never knew when they’d need the same favor.
“I’ve been here all day. There are thirty or forty people who can tell you that.”
“I didn’t say it was you personally,” Charlie answered. “And just for the record, he lived. Tourist doctor patched him up, said he should be up to talking by tomorrow. So I can check.”
Palakiko looked uncomfortable. “Yes, there was a meeting scheduled,” he said. “But it was between my people and his. He wasn’t supposed to be there personally.”
“I’m not sure I believe that. I think you did know he’d be there, and that you didn’t really want to make a deal with him. That kind of thing happens between ordinary politicians, but not with someone who’s set himself up against your church, right? Maybe, after the fight on the Wahiawa road last week, you decided to kill him.”
“You’re making that up, Officer.”
“Am I? All right, then, who else would have done it? What enemies did he have?”
“I don’t know – everyone? He was in dirty business up to his ears – he sold licenses and planning permits, and not everyone cared for it. Maybe one of the triads got to him, or the Madras mafia.”
“Good point, except the one who shot him was kanaka.”
“There are Hawaiians who work for all the gangs, Officer. You know that better than I do.”
“As muscle, but not as shooters. They only trust their own with that.”
“Maybe he was hapa-pake. We’re all one people these days, aren’t we?”
That was a better point than Charlie wanted to admit, which meant that he didn’t dare admit it. “You’ll have to do better, Kelly.”
“Anyone could have been angry at him. You say a kanaka did it? Maybe he was someone who was tired of people like Kahele selling out to the foreigners to get a place in the office buildings where no one from the taro fields will ever work. Maybe he was angry at Kahele for trying to repeal the laws that keep us from being totally submerged in a country where we’re already a minority.”
That, too, was a point. As long as Charlie could recall, the Hawaiians had been fighting for their future, and taking a step back for every one forward. But the contract workers wanted a future too, and so had people like Charlie’s grandfather.
“Do you know anyone in particular who feels that way? Anyone who’s said so, for instance?”
“If I did, do you think I’d tell you?”
“Well, if not, you’re suspect number one.”
“I guess I’ll have to be, then. Because there’s no such person.”
Charlie had never been one of those people who believed he had a magic power to spot liars. That was for the kahunas; cops had to go on evidence. But he knew now, with as much certainty as he’d ever known anything, that Palakiko was lying.
*******
The Prayer:
Ahmed Ka’aukai was the caretaker of the Ahmadi mosque, and he was sweeping the floor when the police officer came in. He waited patiently – that was what he always did with cops. Let them say what they want. Don’t blurt something out that they might not have known they were looking for.
“Charlie Razak,” the policeman said, showing a badge. “Need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Sit down, then.” Ahmed motioned to a chair, but continued to keep his patience.
The silence lengthened, but only for a minute. “Were you at the fight outside of town last week?”
“Most of us were. They were planning to come burn our stores.”
“All right. Did anyone seem like the leader?”
“Other than Palakiko, you mean?”
“Other than him. Was there someone leading the people from the taro fields?”
Ahmed’s conscience warred within himself for a moment. The walls of the mosque were thick with carvings of field workers struggling for justice and stories of mutual aid. The contract workers and peddlers and small shopkeepers survived on that. The subsistence farmers wanted the same thing – they just didn’t know who their enemy really was.
“What makes you think I know who their leaders are?”
“Because the ones who don’t go to the Kanaka Church or the missionary churches out in the country come here. Because they know.”
But Ahmed had only been playing for time to decide, and he’d heard there had been an attempted murder. “Yes, there was one. Pa’ahana. He works for the Kanaka people at elections, and he’s very militant. More so than the church leaders, most of the time – he believes in all the things they say they don’t really mean. He gets in a lot of fights, and this wasn’t the first one.”
The cop leaned in. “Do you think he’d know if Palakiko and Kahele had a meeting planned?”
“He was at the church almost every day, on some errand or another. He and Palakiko were close. I can’t imagine he wouldn’t know.”
“And did he…”
“Talk about revenge for the fight? Or the speech Kahele made afterward, where he called his own people dogs? Oh, I can’t say for sure. But someone did say, an hour or two ago, that he was on his way to the pu’uhonua.”
The officer nodded in sudden understanding. In ancient times, those who had broken the kapus could escape death if they made it to the pu’uhonua – the places of refuge. Now, wanted criminals went there – it wasn’t strictly forbidden to make arrests in the pu’uhonua, but the mob would rise up against any officer who did, especially if the crime in question was political. And there was one in Kualoa Valley, beyond the mountains on the windward side.
“He can’t stay there for long,” Charlie said, but Ahmed knew he didn’t believe that. There was a community of outlaws there, and the land was fertile, and as long as they didn’t stray outside the valley, they could stay as long as they wanted.
“Maybe I can talk him out,” Ahmed answered. Even as he said that, he wasn’t sure why he’d done so. This wasn’t anything he was obliged to take on himself, and nothing that really concerned him. Maybe he wanted the police to owe him a favor – everyone wanted that, didn’t they? Or maybe he wanted to keep the peace between the Muslim and Kanaka families in the taro fields. Maybe he wanted to run for parliament himself one day, as an alternative to both the Hawaiian chauvinists and those like Kahele who despised their own ancestors. Maybe he wanted all Hawaii to be like Honolulu had become.
“Go ahead, if you want. I’m going back to the barracks and putting a notice out on him. Not much else I can do when he’s gone to Kualoa.” The officer turned to walk out with a distinctly frustrated look.
“No, Charlie, why don’t you come with me? People like him want to be heard. If you’re there to hear him, it’ll mean a lot.”
So they drove north in Ahmed’s fiacre, past more plantations and subsistence farms and small towns full of tumbledown houses. Kualoa was only twenty or twenty-two kilometers from Wahiawa as the crow flew, but there were no roads straight over the mountains, so the trip was much longer. The sun was grazing the mountain ridges to the west when the Coast Road finally brought them to the valley’s threshold.
There was a makeshift checkpoint there, and Ahmed walked up to it. “I’m looking for Pa’ahana,” he said. “Is he in there?”
“You know we don’t keep track,” answered the officer inside. “We just make sure they don’t come out. You want him, go in and call him.”
Ahmed left his car behind and crossed the boundary. “Pa’ahana!” he called, and the name echoed from the mountainside.
He hadn’t really expected an answer, but he got one. “You found me,” came a young man’s shout. It didn’t seem like the shout of a fugitive.
“I want to talk to you.”
“About what? Coming out and taking my punishment like a man?”
“You didn’t kill him, you know. They won’t hang you. You’ll get to tell your story in court , for the papers and everyone, and you’ll be out in a few years. Better than staying here while everyone forgets you, no?”
“He didn’t die?”
He must have fled as soon as he fired the shots, Ahmed realized, and he didn’t stay for news. “No, he didn’t. A popolo doctor was there and stitched him up. They say he’ll live.”
The young man standing above them on the cliffside said nothing for a long moment. “The sacrifice failed, then.”
“Sacrifice?” It was the cop, rather than Ahmed, who spoke.
“Yes. Kahele was my sacrifice to Kāne. An offering to drive the foreigners out. Traitors like him are the ones who brought the haoles and the pake and the popolo here in the first place. They’re the sacrifice we have to make if we want to be free again.”
Ahmed had heard that said before, in sermons and speeches. “They didn’t mean that literally, you know.”
“Who cares what they meant? Kahele was my offering. And if that sacrifice failed, I need to make another one. O Kāne, deliver our land back to us, make our people masters of their destiny again rather than starvelings living on foreigners’ mercy, make us pure of blood and heart as we were before…”
I can agree with most of that, Ahmed thought. Purity of blood is an evil obsession, but justice for them – for us…
So deeply was he listening to the prayer’s words that he realized too late what sacrifice the feather-clad man on the cliffside intended to make. “No!” he shouted as Pa’ahana prepared to jump, and he started running up the steep path to the bluffs, but he was less than halfway there before the young man disappeared off the edge of the cliff. By the time Ahmed could look where Pa’ahana had gone, there was only a vanishing ripple in the water to mark where the offering had been made.
I can't exactly say that a post that opens with an attempted murder and closes with a suicide is beautiful, but it's an interesting look at how a free Hawaii is dealing with the changes that a huge amount of outside influence is making to its traditional culture and politics.
The Hawaii of Malê Rising seems like it would be a rather unique place in OTL, but it is merely a microcosm of the wonderfully mixed world of Malê Rising. That being said, the rather nasty beliefs that led to the shooting really serve to indicate that this is no Utopia. But I guess in a place so mixed, there will always be a backlash by those who feel deeply uncomfortable with the enormous changes that have taken place. Even by the high standards of this timeline this was a excellent update.
Long time reader, first time (in-thread) poster, but something in that last post finally stirred me to say something.
I've read and re-read this thread several times. And I can say that, especially with a POD that is so (relatively) modern, this TL is something I could consider "the best of all worlds". From the survival (more or less wholesale) of non-Western cultures, to the incredibly interesting story of the Abacar family, I can only stop and hope that, somehow, the next update won't surpass the last. This hope (happily) falls short each time.
Spectacular work as always, and I look forward to seeing how the future progresses!
I've read and re-read this thread several times. And I can say that, especially with a POD that is so (relatively) modern, this TL is something I could consider "the best of all worlds". From the survival (more or less wholesale) of non-Western cultures, to the incredibly interesting story of the Abacar family, I can only stop and hope that, somehow, the next update won't surpass the last. This hope (happily) falls short each time.
Spectacular work as always, and I look forward to seeing how the future progresses!
Ethno-religious tensions aside, TTL's Hawai'i sounds like a place I'd love to visit.
One thing I thought of this morning was about the how the islands get energy, given that they don't exactly have any native oil, gas, or coal sources. Solar is a ways off being practical, wind probably is too, and geothermal...well...in a strictly technical sense it's probably the best way for them to generate electricity, but OTL there have been some difficulties related to religious and cultural concerns involving the volcanoes, and with the native Hawaiians more in the driver's seat and traditionalists having quite a bit of political power, as this update shows, I'm not sure that that would actually see any development.
So that's made me curious; they surely import gasoline and diesel for vehicles, but do they use geothermal or other local, non-fuel consuming power sources for electricity, or diesel/oil generators?
So that's made me curious; they surely import gasoline and diesel for vehicles, but do they use geothermal or other local, non-fuel consuming power sources for electricity, or diesel/oil generators?
Reading that update, I wish I can say anything more than just mindless praise, but looks like everyone else has asked all that I thought of.
Although I have to admit, Charlie Razak? With a bit of French ancestry? That must have been quite a marriage between his mother and father!
Although I have to admit, Charlie Razak? With a bit of French ancestry? That must have been quite a marriage between his mother and father!
Wind and small scale hydroelectric is also a possibility. I also believe you could generate energy from tidal surges with technology of roughly TTL's 1960 level.
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Hawaii is under a great deal of strain. The Pacific Treaty saved it from becoming someone's political colony at the price of becoming everyone's economic colony. There has been even more immigration than OTL, making the Native Hawaiians a distinct minority. The king is Hawaiian and the legislature is malapportioned in the Hawaiians' favor (think OTL Malaysia), but the economy is overwhelmingly in non-Hawaiian hands. The nobles and politicians do fine through ground rents and corruption, but most other Native Hawaiians are subsistence farmers or fishermen, or live on the outskirts of cities.
Also, as Charlie mentioned, there are fewer pure-blooded Hawaiians every year, although the number of people with partial Hawaiian ancestry (many of whom identify as Hawaiian) is increasing and may someday become a majority.
This adds up, as might be expected, to considerable resentment and cultural anxiety. Not all Native Hawaiians follow the Kanaka Church by any means, but it's understandable why such a movement would arise, and there's broad support for the Church's call for a Hawaiian cultural revival and protective laws. The government is one thing that Hawaiians still largely control, so there's a tendency to use it to encourage immigrants and their descendants to assimilate and to preserve what is still Hawaiian.
As for the al Qaeda comparison: well, the Kanaka Church does want to purify Hawaiian society, and it has its issues with women, although those have more to do with pork and bananas than veils (among other things, the church has identified Ka'ahumanu's breaking of the kapus as one of the points where Hawaii went wrong).
It may all work out eventually, but Hawaii will still have internal conflicts in TTL's present.
It's actually mixed even by TTL standards - foreign investment and settlement from a dozen or more countries, and labor migration from 70 or more, will do that. TTL Hawaii has all the cultural influences of OTL plus India, Southeast Asia, West Africa and the Ottoman Empire/Union. The Malay flavor is actually fairly strong, given Abu Bakar's early interest in investing in Hawaii, and there's a lot of India and Java in the food and social customs. Hawaii is the place that other culturally mixed societies look at and say "what the hell?"
It has all the natural attractions of OTL, a mixed culture and a rich Polynesian history, so what's not to like? There's a reason Hawaii has attracted tourists for as long as there's been modern tourism.
TTL Hawaii is poorer than OTL, though, without the connection to the American economy. Based on an eyeball comparison, rural Hawaii in OTL is about as poor as rural Florida. ITTL it looks more like rural Mexico. The tourist areas are very showy, but outside that it's pretty raw.
Although I have to admit, Charlie Razak? With a bit of French ancestry? That must have been quite a marriage between his mother and father!
This is Hawaii - marriages happen that would be unheard-of, or at least rare, in the rest of the world. For the record, though, Charlie's French mother was a quarter Algerian and was Muslim, which made marriage to a Malay man a lot easier.
BTW, by this time, Razak is a family name rather than a patronymic.
All of them, and possibly Germany as well. With the Pacific Treaty in place, the powers will want to keep an eye on each other and ensure that no one country has a monopoly. There's also a small Hawaiian navy, primarily with coast guard responsibilities, which is based in Pearl and other places.
In OTL, Hawaii was almost entirely oil-dependent in 1960, and that would probably be true in TTL as well. At a guess, there were some experimental geothermal projects in the 1910s or 20s, before the traditionalists' power increased, but that these were later abandoned for the reasons you mentioned. The government is probably more concerned with renewables than it was at this time in OTL, simply because it's poorer and imported oil is expensive, but hydro or wind power would still be at an experimental stage at this point.
Great post, it seemed as if I was reading a novelization of some police procedural.
Nice episode of TTL's Hawaii 5-O
Yes, it could have been a much longer story. I'd thought of having a few more cultural twists get in the way, and for the perp to lead Charlie on a chase to the old shrine on Necker Island, but it was already getting unwieldy for a narrative update.
Thanks, and please keep reading and commenting!
Next up: Madras, 1961. I'm currently planning Nyanza for 1962, with 1963 somewhere in Europe but the idea is still nebulous. I do know what 1964 and 1965 will be, but I'm not telling.
Sulemain
Banned
Can the place in Europe be Russia? Please
Or maybe one of Germany's "Clients" in Eastern Europe.
I have the image of Charlie driving around Pearl Harbour, seeing "Great steel shapes, the flags of half a dozen nations flapping in the wind. American, Russian, German, Japanese, Australian, with those small vessels flying the flag of his country dwarfed by the foreign giants. There was even one of new nuclear submarines, sleek and deadly. The Americans sure build wonderful machines he thought".
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BioDiesel and or sugar cane (or pineapple!) based ethanol as well?
There should be a story only thread for this or a spot in the finished timeline and scenarios forum?
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No, but there's this instead.
That's a Wiki page, meaning someone has to volunteer to update it, so it isn't guaranteed to be absolutely current. At this moment it isn't; sketchdoodle last did it almost a month ago on Sept. 22. But you can find every canon post before then there; the titles Jonathan gave are there, and/or description of the post; when I did a batch I took to quoting the opening lines since I found them very iconic and memorable--Jonathan generally tells you who, what, where, when and why in the first line.
I like it better than a separate story only thread, and I dread the day (coming soon I guess
) when this belongs in "finished stories."I bet it would be worthwhile it to spin out that story into a novella - even if it were just for your private enjoyment. It seems like this timeline's Hawaii is perfect for noir. Moreover, since it's such a salad bowl (as opposed to a melting pot), it's a great way to introduce the greater world in isolation. If readers saw a short story set in this crazy Hawaii, they'd get bits and pieces of the outside world, but only through its influence. Not a bad way to hook people into reading everything, no?
Once again, you've made me sad that I can't vacation across universes. But it's a lovely sad.
Once again, you've made me sad that I can't vacation across universes. But it's a lovely sad.