(ABOVE) "I wanted to center the story in such a sacred place, which was also part of my life growing up," says writer Kawai Strong Washburn of Waipio valley on Hawaii Island, where some of his acclaimed debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors is set.
Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Kawai Strong Washburn's acclaimed 2020 debut novel, begins with a vision set in Waipio, on Hawaii Island. It's pau hana Friday in the late '80s, and young couple Malia and Augie have made their way to Waipio's black-sand beach to frolic in the back of their pickup truck. Suddenly, they spot a string of lights moving in the distance. Could it be the night marchers of Hawaiian legend, they wonder, the spirits of ancient chiefs and warriors? "We'd heard of the night marchers but always assumed it was only a myth, part of a hymn of what had been lost to Hawaii, these ghosts of the long-dead alii [chiefs]," Malia thinks. "But there they were. Marching slow on their way up the ridge headed for the black back of the valley and whatever waited there for undead kings in all the damp and darkness."
The scene blends earthy realism with elements of myth and magic, and introduces the themes of past and present Hawaii that reverberate throughout the book. For Washburn, 39, who was born and raised on the Hamakua coast nearby, it was a natural place to open the story, rich in symbolism and personal meaning. "Waipio valley is a place that is very important and sacred in Native Hawaiian culture, beliefs and history, so that was one of the reasons I wanted the novel to kick off there," he tells me over Zoom from his home in frigid Minneapolis ("With wind chill, it's like minus twenty today!") when we speak in January. He is warm and demonstrative, especially animated when talking about his roots in the Islands and broader issues of environmental and social justice in both Hawaii and Minneapolis.
Washburn on Kona Pier, off of which the protagonist of the novel is saved from drowning by what might be aumakua-deities-in the form of sharks.
"I wanted to center the story in such a sacred place, which was also part of my life growing up," he says. The novel is informed by Washburn's own experiences in Honokaa in the 1980s and '90s, though it's imbued with magical touches. Nainoa, who is conceived on that night in Waipio, might possess special powers himself. When he is miraculously rescued by a shiver of sharks off Kona as a seven-year-old, his parents believe their suspicions are confirmed: Could Nainoa, in fact, be the savior his family, and the Islands, desperately need? (His siblings—Dean, nine, and Kaui, four, at the time—are less convinced of his superhuman gifts.)
Years later Malia will wrestle with the burdens she and Augie placed on Nainoa. "Sometimes I believe none of this would have happened if we'd stayed on the Big Island, where the gods are still alive," she says, invoking the fire goddess Pele and the war god Ku, who also appears as a shark. "I wonder if some of him is you, and if some of you is him, the way the ocean and the dirt and the air here are all made of the gods. It was what I believed at first: That you were made of the gods, that you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawaii."
Washburn spent ten years working on Sharks in the Time of Saviors, never quite sure whether it would find an audience—or publisher—but determined to write the novel he himself wanted to read. The image of a young boy being guided to safety by sharks appeared to him one day, he says, and wouldn't let go of his imagination. He carried it with him as he moved across the country, from Washington, DC, to the Bay Area, before finally settling in Minneapolis. Who was this boy and where was he from? he kept asking. Eventually, he decided, the story would take place close to home and would be based on the realities of life in Hawaii.
"As I started to write and settle on who this family was, I knew that one of the things I wanted to talk about was the socioeconomic state of the Islands, which a lot of people are not really familiar with," Washburn explains. "For me it was a very obvious, unspoken part of my experience of the Islands because I grew up in Honokaa, which is a blue-collar town." The local sugar industry was thriving throughout his early childhood, Washburn recalls, but had shut down by the time he was in sixth grade. In the novel, when Augie loses his job in the mid-'90s, the family relocates to Kalihi, on Oahu, where a relative helps him find work. Later, all three of the children leave the Islands in search of greater economic and personal opportunities, scattering across the West Coast to Spokane, Portland and San Diego.
It's rare for writing about Hawaii to make much of an impact on the literary world beyond the Islands, but Strong's book won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for a debut novel.
Another important aspect that Washburn wanted to capture was the unique ethnic and racial mix—the hapa culture—that he knew as a child on Hawaii Island. "In my experience growing up in the Islands, sometimes people could name all their racial and ethnic backgrounds, and sometimes they couldn't or didn't really care to," says Washburn, whose parents are originally from Oklahoma and Missouri but met in Hawaii while his father was doing a PhD at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. "I had friends who were a variety of races, and I wanted to render that in the book. I think it's one of the things that I appreciated about the Islands, and it was something that didn't make me feel as much of an 'other' as when I came to the continental United States—which is part of what drove me to write the book."
After leaving Hawaii at 18, Washburn says, his identity became a source of frequent fascination and confusion. "As I began to write, I realized there were all these experiences, these unnamed moments, when I felt like an outsider because of my racial and ethnic background," he explains. "People were always asking me, 'Who are you?' 'What are you?' Because nobody could quite figure it out. Why does it matter? It didn't matter in the Islands. They could tell I wasn't white, and that was all that really mattered."
Washburn's book ultimately found a publisher-one of the country's most prestigious ones at that. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, based in New York, also happened to be the home of Lois-Ann Yamanaka, whose pidgin-rich books such as Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers and Blu's Hanging inspired Washburn. "Her characters are born and raised in the Islands, and the Island part of their identity and culture resonated very strongly with me," says Washburn, who recalls the thrill of discovering Yamanaka and being "seen" in her books. "It was the first time I had read something by an author from the Islands, about the Islands, that was like, 'If you're from here, you'll get this. If you're not, you've got to come along for the ride. But I'm not writing to explain the Islands from a foreigner's perspective. I'm writing about them in the way I experienced them and I lived in them.'"
"I get there and I can feel the difference," says Washburn of visiting the Islands from his current home in Minneapolis. "The humidity of the air and the majesty of the natural environment—those three peaks on the Big Island that were backdrops for most of my youth-just trigger something in me. I could feel it feeding my soul." Above, a view of one of those peaks, Hualalai, from Kona Pier.
It's thanks to Yamanaka and other groundbreaking Island writers such as Kiana Davenport and Kaui Hart Hemmings, he says, that his own path to publication was much smoother in the end. He also points to an overall shift in publishing that has opened the way for authors from more diverse and underrepresented backgrounds—writers such as Marlon James, Tommy Orange and Ocean Vuong, for example, whose work he feels he is somehow in conversation with. "It's much more acceptable now to write the sort of book I've written and have it get published without a second thought. Whereas I'm sure for writers like Kiana and Lois-Ann, it was an uphill battle."
But even with the backing of a major publishing house, Washburn's novel faced serious challenges when it came out in March 2020. The pandemic had paralyzed the country, and book tours, like much else, were canceled. Things got worse in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd in May. Washburn felt "wiped out" and shattered: "The city was on fire, and people would call me to talk about my book and I was like, 'Who cares about my book! Does this book matter whatsoever right now?'"
And yet, eventually, attention did turn to his book, and accolades and awards followed. Washburn was humbled by the praise the book garnered from the very contemporaries he so admired: Marlon James called it a "ferocious debut" told "with daredevil lyricism to burn"; Tommy Orange raved, "It's so good it hurts and hurts to where it heals. It is revelatory and unputdownable." Writing in the New York Times, Imbolo Mbue summed up her glowing review, "This passionate writer cries out for us to see Hawaii in its totality: as a place of proud ancestors and gods and spirits, but also of crumbling families and hopelessness and poverty. Of mystery and beauty at every corner."
The book would go on to win the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut novel and the 2021 Minnesota Book Award, among other prizes. And, perhaps most exciting, Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of the year. But even that was hard for Washburn to appreciate under the circumstances. "These last couple of years have been awful for so many reasons," he sighs, "that I don't know if I'll ever be able to enjoy those things-the awards, the interviews, the lists-as much as I could have without a pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the massive social unrest and racial reckoning that's happening in the Twin Cities right now."
This past December, Washburn returned to Hawaii for the holidays with his wife and two young children, his first trip back in four and a half years. The Omicron surge, sadly, put a wrench in most plans. He wasn't able to do any belated readings or events, but he was able to drop by several Kona bookstores to sign copies and meet with booksellers. And just being home in the Islands had an ineffable effect. "I get there and I can feel the difference," he says, his eyes lighting up. "You know, the humidity of the air and the majesty of the natural environment—those three volcanic peaks on the Big Island that were the backdrops for most of my youth—just trigger something in me. I could feel it feeding my soul."
In Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Nainoa, Dean and Kaui all end up coming back to Hawaii Island after failing to find what they were seeking elsewhere. But only Kaui—who works on a local farm while caring for her ailing father—is able to forge lasting ties there. "People have different readings of the book," Washburn argues, "but for me the thing that I thought it ended up being about is a recognition that to be the best version of ourselves, we need to honor the truly interconnected nature of humans in the natural environment."
Kaui, like her parents in Waipio, will have her own stirring vision linking her to Hawaii's past: "They are there. Finding me when I close my eyes. Women who can only be Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian], skin joyfully dark and thick with work, proud cheeks and eyes full of the old island ways. ... They dance on a hilltop. They dance in a valley. Kaholo, ami kahela, lele, uwehe. They reap in bundles with hands plunging into dark-brown soil that gives and gives and gives. Something is alive all over my body now. Something like a hula that won't stop dancing."
Back in the polar airflow of Minneapolis, meanwhile, Washburn is at work on a new book that he calls "almost purely a climate justice novel." He is interested in exploring how racial and climate issues will play out in the decades to come, and he is surprisingly optimistic. "I want to believe in a future where we undo the history of institutional racism that leads to the sort of environmental injustice we've seen," he insists. "I want to write about that so I can help make it a reality. I believe in that world; I want to build it." And even if it has been hard to move things forward politically, he admits, he still feels "incredibly powerful" as an artist. "I write stories, I imagine worlds, and why not do that in a way that pushes back at this prevailing narrative that the future is doomed, right?"
