 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Aloha. My name is Roger Jelonek. I'm host of the Book World's program on Think Tech Hawaii. And my guest today is Robert Barclay, who's the publisher of Loiki Books. And he has just published a wonderful book by Ian McMillan called In the Time Before Light, which is here in front of us. And Robert, tell us a bit about yourself first. You are a published author yourself. Yes. What do you do for a living? For a real living? For a real living. What pays the bills is I'm the chair of the Language Arts Department at Winward Community College. I teach literature, composition, creative writing. I'm also the advisor to the Campuses Film Club, so I help students make short films, videos, that sort of thing. And you went through the UH mill. Yes. I went from Honolulu Community College with an AA degree to a BA and MA and a PhD at Manila. Congratulations. Thank you. It was a lot of work. You're also the author of a really remarkable book called Melow. Thank you, yes. Just very briefly, let's tell us about that. It's a novel that deals with the legacy of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands where I grew up. And the novel takes place over the course of a single day with a Marshallese family and some American boys who come into conflict on that island. And it just deals with the struggles that the Marshallese have as a legacy of still dealing with issues from the nuclear testing. It's a wonderful book. It got a Kiriyama Prize, if I recall. And it's now being made into a movie in New Zealand. And Australia. And Australia. It's a two-production company, co-production deal in Australia and New Zealand. So we're a really cosmopolitan author. Yes, yes. Okay. Tell me about your relationship with Ian McMillan. This is Ian McMillan's posthumous novel. Right. Well, he died about five years ago. No, he died in 2008, I believe. 2008, okay. What was your relationship to Ian McMillan? Ian McMillan had been my advisor at Manoa since I had my bachelor's degree. And then he was the advisor for my master's thesis. And he was the advisor for my doctoral dissertation. And I had taken several classes from him along the way. Ian McMillan is probably the most prominent contemporary writer based in Hawaii. He had two tracks of publishing. One in New York. He was published by Viking Press. And then he was published here several books, I think, by Mutual Publishing. Mutual and Anoai Press. And Anoai Press. And just briefly describe the kinds of books that he wrote. Ian wrote... The first book he wrote was a post-apocalyptic novel that was sort of like Stephen King's... What's his post-apocalyptic book? The Road or something like that. You told me. Yes. But anyway, he gravitated into a fascination with World War II, particularly with how the everyday citizens living in Europe would deal with these massive global forces coming in. His most famous book in that genre was Village of a Million Spirits, which centers on the prisoner uprising in Problinka. And what he gets at in those books... Concentration. Concentration Canada. Yes. And what's similar to those books in this book is him trying to understand generally the depravity that exists in this world and why human beings do such awful things to each other. We'll get into that. What were the circumstances of this particular book? I was thinking of starting a small publishing company as a hobby. And he contacted me and asked me if I'd like to publish this book. I hadn't published any books yet. So this was the first book that I was offered. I published four other books before this. One of them, Mark Panick's book, Hawaii, a novel, won the Kapalapala Okelo Award for Excellence in Literature. So I took a lot of time and care with this book over the years. And finally, you know, I got it in with 2008. So I'm finally getting around to publishing it. But he completed it before he left. Yes. It was a completed novel I just had to do. And I worked with him back and forth a bit discussing how to put chapter breaks and the level of editing that he wanted done to the book. So it's very much according to his plan and his desires for how it should come out. What does the title mean? In The Time Before Light. It relates to Hawaiian legend, Hawaiian mythology, in that there was a time before light. I think you could probably put a western lens on it as well and look at us as living in sort of philosophical darkness. It speaks of it in the past tense, in the time before light. One might argue, reading this book, that we're still in that time before light. We still do horrible things to each other as people. That's neat. I'm fairly well read in 19th century Hawaiian history. But one really mysterious period, which is very little written about, which is very much the subject of this book, is the period between the time that Captain Cook arrived and the missionaries arrived. What do we know about what life was like in that critical time when Kamehameha unified the islands? This is not a work of history. This is a work of imagination. Correct. In that sense it's very daring. I've just finished reading it. I had a wonderful time with it. It's very precise about the detail of Hawaiian culture in that time. It's really remarkable for that. Tell us more about that. While it is a work of imagination, Ian was always a very meticulous researcher in his writing. He got a lot of praise for that with his World War II books from Jewish organizations, the Jerusalem Post newspaper. I'm not exactly sure what his sources are for the book, but you see the level of detail. It's remarkable. We'll get back to the language that he uses a little later. What's the premise of the book? The premise of the book is a British merchant comes to Hawaii with all the prejudices and biases and fascinations that people of his time would have with the Pacific. This is set in 1824, right? 1824, yes. He comes and he meets a Hawaiian man, Pono, who speaks perfect English. In fact, one might argue that he speaks better English than Matthew. Matthew is at once offended and curious about why this man speaks so well. He thinks it's some sort of parlor trick, but the more he gets to know the man and the man offers to tell him his life story, over the course of the novel he realizes that Pono not only speaks better English than he does, he's smarter than Matthew is, he's more worldly and world traveled than Matthew is, and he's much wiser and more civilized than Matthew is. And so that sort of Matthew's art discovering that this native of Hawaii, who he would assume would be something approaching a kind of ignorant savage, could actually be a better man than he is. Well, it's also that conversation he has with Pono is set at a time in Honlulu, where Honlulu was populated with sailors on a spree, and it was one bar after another and everyone was... It was a miserable time for Hawaiians in Honlulu. I mean, the disease that you see as we move from the chapters that focus on Pono's life history, and then when we come back to the time that Matthew is in real time with Pono in Hawaii, we see the disease and the misery that Hawaiians are going through at that time. So what is the story that Pono has to tell in the outline? Pono is much like Ishmael in Moby Dick. He's a witness. He gets kidnapped by a... He's in his 20s and he's kidnapped by this privateer who has a notorious reputation and he's feared worldwide, but... A successful privateer. But this privateer's main fascination is with researching depravity as it exists around the world. He's trying to understand why people do horrible things to each other, and so he's drawn to it in this fantastic voyage that circumnavigates the Pacific Rim and they go from one horrible human situation to another and along the way, as this privateer Beckwith is trying to understand these conflicts, Pono is also coming to terms with why people do horrible things to each other and also seeing how it's always a few people who control the masses. It takes... I mean, we can look at our present political situation, how one person can have so much control over so many people. And I think those two things go together, which is what allows a lot of dark things to happen. There's a passage in the book that I think kind of sums this up pretty well. If I could read it real briefly here. This is Beckwith, the privateer talking to Pono. He says, we have all learned much, we have learned that we humans have much to learn and that learning itself does not shield us from ourselves. On the face of every man I have ever seen commit an act of cruelty upon another man I have seen in the tightness of his jaw an expression of conviction of his justification and the rightness of what he was doing regardless of the inconvenience of the obvious. And I think that really nails what a lot of horrible people do. Just today, the head of Serbia was convicted of war crimes. Crimes against humanity as an obvious example. One of the main locations where the action takes place I think on the Waini Coast and then goes to China. China, it goes to North America. Probably looks like Oregon, somewhere between Oregon and Northern California. It goes to China, it goes to Malaysia, the Philippines. And then comes back around to Hawaii. What I find fascinating is at first Pono tells the story as a Hawaiian word, as an oral history. And only gradually do we realize that he's learned how to write extremely well. And one fascinating aspect to me is that when he's on board the ship the ship happens to have a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I read that, I thought, come on, they don't have the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1824. So I looked it up and sure enough it was actually invented in 1780 and it's been going pretty much ever since. But he sent out not only to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica which was not quite as big as it is now, but to memorize it. And that gives Ian McMillan an opportunity for this man to be extraordinarily articulate and learned. Much more so than Matthew. Fascinating, very clever idea. I thought the way he handles Hawaiian language and vocabulary was quite marvelous. It's usually a major stumbling block and why a lot of books that are written about Hawaii don't make it on the mainland because there's people trying to put a meaning in parenthesis and it's just awkward and it's like reading footnotes. But this is really gracefully done and you just sort of know what he means and it's a considerable vocabulary. It's not just Aloha and Mahalo, it's a considerable vocabulary. What was that like from your point of view to read and edit? Did you find that it just worked for you as well? It worked. There were a few things I edited where things were in quote marks or italicized. So I was trying to make that consistent throughout when we pair an English word with a Hawaiian word. So it was a little unevenness there but that was something I'd spoken with Ian about and so we figured out how to even that out. Well, we're going to take a break now but we'll get back to some of the wonderful and major scenes in the book. Okay, thank you. 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He has some really wonderful scenes in this book. What's your favorite scene? My favorite scene in this book is when Pono is a teenager and he's having trouble spearfishing. And he accidentally learns how to see underwater by trapping a small bubble of air. And what I like most about this is it shows how intellectually curious Pono is. He wants to understand not only that he can do it, but the physics behind it. To catch fish. To catch fish. Octopus. Yeah. So he's catching fish. He's catching octopus. And because it is such a rare and unique talent, his father fears it will get him in trouble. So he tells him to never speak of it. But you know, go get us, feel free to get us some fish for dinner. Have you tried it? I've tried it. Almost every time I'm in the water, it occurs to me to give it a try. And we can all capture the bubble in our hand, but to get it to stick on the eye. But I could see how it's possible. But one day I will. And I think I'll have the epiphany that Pono has in the novel when he discovers this. And for the first moment he can see as clear as in daylight underwater. I mean, I think I'll have that same epiphany, even though I've seen with a mask before. But I think that would just be fantastic. But you do believe it's possible? Oh, yeah. I can tell it's possible. I thought some of the extraordinary scenes were battle scenes. They were just so vivid and so personal. And you really could feel the axe hitting somebody's arm or whatever. There are several battles. Tell us about one or two of them. Well, there's the battle in the beginning between neighboring villages. What Ian has always had a tremendous talent for is visual and sensory description. And down to minute details of someone soiling themselves in the middle of battle and having to continue on into the feel of someone's intestines getting slick on your hand and impacting your ability to hang on to your spill. There's lots of battles in the book. And what I think we get out of all of them is how unnecessary they are. And that's the tragedy of human, one of the tragedies of human existence. And how really cruel the consequences are. Yes, and why we do it in the first place. And also how masculine it is, how male-dominated these conflicts are. The women are always on the sides supporting the men in doing this. As the story travels around the Pacific Rim, it's men doing the same things from one different culture to another. I was struck by the fact that in talking about Hawaiian history today, there's very little said about the cruel aspects of Hawaiian culture at that time. But he's very bold about it. It just sounds like a pretty rough life if you're not an Ali'i. Most of the history that's being written out is about Ali'i decisions. It's not about ordinary people. It's remarkable. One other really interesting theme is that there's an epidemic going on at the time. They're alternating narratives, right? Just talk about that a little. So when Matthew comes to Honolulu and he learns how fascinating Pono is, he immediately wants to transcribe his life story. So he finds an American who's willing to sit down and transcribe Pono's life story as Pono narrates it orally. And so the book itself alternates between Pono's narrative and the narrative Matthew going about his life in Honolulu and seeing things that he didn't expect, such as the epidemics, the misery. And over the course of Pono's narrative, it allows him to see the Hawaiian people in a much different light than what he originally thought, what he originally expected he would see when he came to the island. There's one epidemic right at the end of the book when Kamehameha has assembled over a thousand canoes and a whole army to go and take Kwa'i, the second attempt. And overnight, half the army dies of some mysterious disease. Is that actually true? I don't know if the book says they'd die, but I know that that's fairly well historically documented that that was the reason the invasion failed as they all ended up with some sort of dysentery. And yeah, a lot of them did die. And so what Ian has done is he's taken that historical data and then imagined it from a personal level and then put us on the beach. Which is also a symbol of the curse, which is a major theme in the book. Tell us about the curse. Well, Pono's family, as Pono describes it, has always felt that they had this odd curse where at various generations, a son would end up killing the father. And this actually does happen a few times over the course of the narrative. And at the end of the book, Pono's life is threatened by that of his own son, who he discovers has turned into a Christian preacher who is very angry at Hawaiians who decide to remain as evens. And so they come into conflict and it appears as though the curse will... And in the lore of, among Hawaiians, this epidemic of dysentery is a parallel curse. And that invasion was not meant to be, was the message. There's another character in the book, a woman, a missionary, who's a pretty unusual missionary. Ms. Searle, yes. Could you describe her? Well, I think she came to Hawaii, you know, vetted as the good Christian girl that she was supposed to be. She was married or not? I think, yes, she was married and her husband died. And then rather than trying to impose Western values on the Hawaiians, she's learned to accept certain Hawaiian values without giving up her Christianity. For example, not being... You know, this is Victorian, was it? Victorian times, yes, Victorian times, where Western women, British women would be very afraid of revealing their bodies. But she feels very free and in front of Matthew decides to take a dip, half naked in a pool, which shocks him. So she's very much ahead of her time. But what's interesting about her is that she's seen the righteousness of the native perspective and the wrongness of what is happening to them as a result of Western context. She struck me that was Ian's own point of view, most clearly, you know. Which brings me to another subject. This book has a very interesting dedication, which I took to have a very specific meeting. It's called Two Our Imaginations. A major issue now in Hawaiian culture and writing about Hawaiian culture is who owns the story? This book, I think, will be a classic. It'll stand up for a very long time as a description of the life of Hawaii at that time. But inevitably it's going to run into ideologues who say Ian McMillan as a Hawley writer did not have the right to tell the story. But here you have someone who has extraordinary skill and extraordinary publishing record, a man of great probity, imagining what life was like in great detail in a way that, as far as I'm aware, no one else in Hawaii right now is capable of doing. To me it's a really interesting... Yeah, and there will be criticism for that. And I think that's just the nature of publishing a book. A book gets all the praise and it gets all the criticism it deserves. And if you want, neither, don't publish a book. So we'll see. I mean, it just came out. We'll see what people say about it. Well, it cuts a really great jacket. Could you talk about the jacket? Yeah, it's a beautiful cover. This is a work of art by Carl F. K. Powell, a Hawaiian artist. The work of art was so easy when I designed the cover of the book. I mean, the work is so beautiful that when he gave it to me it was so easy to design the cover because all I had to do was keep the words out of the way of the picture. But if you go to our Loihi Press Facebook page you'll see a longer description of the artwork. But basically it's the tension between trying to protect something and not destroy it at the same time. So this orb here represents something sacred and then you have these jagged teeth simultaneously protecting it and threatening to destroy it. Well, we have to wrap this up. And Robert, thank you very much. Oh, thanks for having me. This is great. Oh, good luck with the book. Thank you. Aloha.