In the Time Before Light by Ian MacMillan

I described for him first the size of the world, and the size of the islands in the world, the distances. He listened to this intently, and then asked me what the haoles were like, how their world was different from ours. "It is very different," I said, "and in ways very similar. The world of the haoles is made up like our own in this way: there are two kinds of people--ali'i and common people, and the common people do the bidding of the haole ali'i. Those haoles I knew were all, at one time or another, victims of these ali'i, and in various ways escaped them as I escaped Kahimoku. I went on to try to make clear to him why so many heads were chopped off in China, and why two boys were burned to death in King Philip's Land. As I descriebd these things, I thoguht of Muapo's story, and understood how this pattern seemed to repeat itself, both in the things I had seen and in the stories I had heard. The world, it seemed, was made tis way.

One of the more interesting things I saw on my trip to Hawaii was the Pu'ukohola Heiau, a great temple built by Kamehameha I, the warrior-king who was the first to unite all the islands. Kamehameha was told by a kahuna, a priest, that he would be victorious against his enemies if he built a temple at what was known as Whale Hill; he did, and he was. What remains today is the great base of the temple, an enormous edifice of lava rocks that is all the more impressive for being made with no mortar: the rocks are simply chosen and positioned so that they bear each others' weight, and so clever were the Hawaiians at this that the temple remains intact today. Pono, the protagonist of Ian MacMillan's novel In the Time Before Light, is conscripted along with his family by a great ali'i, a chief, to build just such a temple. Pono, who belongs to the lowest, outcast class of Hawaiian society, having been ousted from his home by a neighboring band, works under the eye of the sadistic kahuna Kahimoku, who likes to select the weakest among his workers and kill them as a show of strength. When Pono finally is chosen for death, he is saved at the last moment by Roger Beckwith, an English pirate whose crew is made up of those whom, like Pono, he's saved from execution at the hands of authority.

Aboard Beckwith's ship, Pono proves to be a quick learner. He picks up English immediately (though MacMillan never addresses how easy it would be for a Hawaiian, whose language contains neither an F nor a T, to utter the first word "foot") and voraciously devours Beckwith's encyclopedia. Pono becomes a valued crewmate, and alongside his new mates he travels as far as the Philippines, China, New Zealand, and even the western American coast. Though he longs to return and search for the wife and children from whom he's been separated, Pono is one of the first Hawaiians after contact with Europeans to be ushered into the now much wider world, and what he finds is that that world is not so different from his own. As the excerpt above describes, his principal discovery is that everywhere, the big people exploit the little people. This is an interesting viewpoint, I think, for a white writer to take when writing about Indigenous people; similar arguments have been made to dismiss the depredations of colonialism: Well, they weren't so peaceful before we got there, you know. And yet it's hard to deny the truth of the matter; when I looked at Kamehameha's temple on Whale Hill, I thought of MacMillan's novel and the nameless, unremembered labor that must have occurred at the king's request.

What makes the book work, I think, is the frame story, in which an aged Pono tells his story to a British sailor in Honolulu with an interest in publishing his account. The Hawaii the sailor sees, as Pono illustrates, is a different one from the one he left behind when he was rescued by the pirates. For one, the warfare that turned Pono into an outcast is no longer, thanks to Kamehameha (who I think remains unnamed, a silent force), and white traders have descended en masse, bringing with them new ways of life--and new, devastating diseases. Perhaps it's true that everywhere the ali'i exploit the common people, but it's true also that Pono's new world is one that comes with new and frightening kinds of exploitation. As Pono tells his story, a rumor arrives that a Hawaiian Christian convert is due to arrive at Honolulu, one with the same name that Pono gave his long-lost son. The reunion is a failure; the son rejects the father because he has found another father. It seems like the final nail in the coffin for the Hawaii that Pono once knew, replaced by something that is perhaps no worse but certainly no better. And yet, this scene gives some hope, too: Pono's wife is still living somewhere near Hilo. When he sets off at the end of the novel to find her, MacMillan suggests that restitution and repair are possible even in a world that has slipped out from under one's feet.