“THE PEACE CORPS ARE GOING TO PARADISE.” Kluge had wanted Ethiopia or Turkey where the women are interesting, but instead he had been given paradise. And despite people’s reactions, as well as his own, he falls pray to the whole “Last Virgin in Paradise,” theme:

Micronesia! I can still picture my friends’ reactions, stares, shrugs, hugs, that seemed to say: Remember him as he was. It wasn’t Ethiopia or Turkey, not by a long shot. Polynesia? Now that was something people could get behind, Gauguin, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Michener. The South Pacific! Or even Melanesia, dark, mean, aboriginal, anthropological places like the Solomons and New Guinea, Headhunters and cannibals. But Micronesia? It was barely on the map…Maybe I should rethink my misgivings about Vietnam, my relatives implied (15-16).

           Micronesia, to the young Kluge it was the wife you settle for, as an illegal immigrant. The one you wed to keep yourself alive and kicking. It would become a wife he would grow to love, and pine for when he was thousands of miles away. But it was still a relationship which he would never truly commit to. He would always leave, and then be desperate to come back. Even the language of his first chapters, which is titled as “Gambier, Ohio: The Reproach of the Sunset.” In which Kluge first hears of his friend’s passing, and decides to make the voyage, the style, the words, are those of an empty lover, who starves himself from his lady, so that when they are together, there love is all the more passionate.

            It is the lure of the other which half brings Kluge into the islands. It is the exoticism that drove people to the East before the “Age of Discovery,” and it is that same idea in which men buy mail order brides, or many women from exotic places. Kluge writes with that lame, and half effective travel voice that has typecast the Pacific since the turn of the century. It is the air of both superiority as well as impartiality.

            It is that blend of folksy charming language, with statements of cultural loss in Western terms, and Orientalism again in Western terms. Much of the book is spent lamenting the state of the islands, what they have become, how far they have fallen. Like most author’s or historians, the blame for these losses is rarely directed at American shores, although Kluge does crudely intimate to the existence of Marijuana in the islands, as being a Peace Corps intervention.

            “Everybody credited marijuana to the Peace Corps,” he says [Reverend Edmund Kalau], casting an apologetic smile my way. “Before they had beetlenut, alcohol and sakau, and beetlenut is habit forming, not addictive. Then marijuana came in, started by the Americans here…Now grandmothers go around and sell marijuana. I’ve been stopped and offered a marijuana cigarette for two dollars (81).”

      The journalistic nature, and instincts the author is supposed to possess go largely unused throughout the text. Marijuana being just a simple example, but in terms of real effects of American rule it is merely implied. Kluge scarcely attacks the American government for its effects in the islands. Instead he indirectly points his finger at them, by showcasing political gossip between the islanders. Rather than attacking America, he attacks their allies, the islanders who have adopted American lifestyles, or thinking, or systems of existence. He is closest, and knows the most about those who are leaving behind the old ways, who were educated in Hawaii or in the states. Who don’t just want new technology, which is the place of most islanders, but want the way of life, primarily the American. He uses them to move along his trip, rarely seeking for further answers, content merely to put the natives on display.

            One such example is with John Haglelgam, who at that time had recently become president of the FSM.

            And then I ask the old questions: about going back.

“I can go back and live for a short time,” he says, “But I couldn’t go back and stay there all my life. I’m a scholarly type. I lack what my father has. I lack the ability to make canoes. I’m too old to learn the traditional skills, to live there and enjoy life. My orientation is toward Western culture. Books. Government. Discussion. I really enjoy the academic life (72).”

      The problem  with Kluge’s approach is that he falls into the stereotype of the “stereotyping haole.” It is irrelevant that “some of his closest friends are natives.” He approach to depicting the political life of the islands, reflects on these cultures as wholes, and of course merely reduplicates the stereotype since the arrival of Magellan, that the people of these islands, are nothing more than “squabbling natives.”

For Senators and Congressman, politicians in the West to fight, it is discourse, it is oration, it is civilization, it is often time associated with thinking critically or the democratic process. But when these islanders, of which America has mimetically attempted to re-create in their own image, attempt to play out and assume those role we have given them. They are little more than bad copies, poor mimics, they are demeaned throughout the book like this, as Kluge chats with beachcomber after beachcomber.

Problems in Micronesia are evident, from the book, as well as in reality. However, Kluge, the former Peace Corps volunteer, who is supposed to help these people in someway or another, is not building a very good narrative framework for them. Sure, in the 1960’s he built houses, he says he wrote the preamble to the Federated States of Micronesia’s Constitution, he says he loves these islands. Then, is this perhaps tough love? His degrading of the people of the islands, so that they may learn?

It is almost comical, that he treats the Micronesians, who want nothing more than anyone else in life, than the best things possible whether they be on the island or in far away lands, with the same disdain the ex-Marine officers-turned-teachers used to treat the Peace Corps kids, who had come to the islands, under the guise of the search of paradise, but in truth were only trying to save their necks.

            Kluge, places himself above the people he lived with, the people whom he says, he tried to help save their culture and beautiful beaches, but then he cannot help but sneer, he cannot help but degrade. The afore quoted paragraph, about the voluntary poverty, and the vicious circle of desires; how natives want the post-industrial and how the post industrials want the native, is the cause of this. There is a mobius strip of the desire for the other, and that is what in Kluge’s mind, gives him the validation for his superior voice and position. It is because he has what they want, and he wants something more, that he sees natives as squabblers, and bumblers. He teases a native politician in his text for using the word “boo-boo,” and such focus on native quirks are common, in this text, and others that take its tone.

            The examples which immediately spring forth, are Mokil and Pacific Passages. Mokil, is a documentary made by the University of Southern California Anthropology Department, about a small atoll island named Mokil. The film features the islanders daily survival, their hardships, and in true soap opera fashion, exploits their gossip, and their customs, and their relationships. It is truly an island culture, interpreted through Western ideas, and narrated with purely Western voices and manipulations.

            Pacific Passages, is a text written by Ronald Stade, a Swedish Researcher who spent several months on Guam, trying to fit Guam into his ideas of world culture and politics. What was created was a book which covers several important issues on Guam, or abortion culture, language, politics in terms of the global discourse and culture. What is of course left out, as with Mokil and The Edge of Paradise, is the culture being delineated, described, interpreted and often criticized. All three of the above mentioned texts and film, reproduce that centuries old image of natives squabbling over an island. Squabbling over their little rock.

            This is most apparent in Kluge’s work in that he makes no visible attempt to research the cultures in which he is describing, for his journalistic shield law, allows him to stereotype, to be vague, to be incorrect and incomplete, as his work is not inherently academic, it is only made academic by the reader, who gives it such status.

            But Kluge is supposed to be a passioned “Micronesian at heart.” A man who helped so much the causes for commonwealth and free association, and for better ways of life for the islanders. His text gives the impression that he knows nothing of these people he claims to live amongst, as if they were savages, that he had tamed. He writes with almost an armchair feel to these places, and his descriptions are so tourist in nature, that at times I wondered if he was merely making up everything he had written. He history of the entire region, the author sarcastically remarks can be summed up in a single sentence: 

    The Spanish came for God, the Germans came for glory, the Japanese came for gold, and the Americans came for good (16).”

  Unfortunately, Kluge leaves this statement as being appropriate enough, and never fixes it, never giving us more. He buys into the simplicity of the canonized history, and deems this to be adequate. This of course is what should make the reader skeptical about his voice, for if you asked Salii or any of the other natives mentioned in the book, I’m sure this would be a cruel joke, funny in its simplicity, but empty and racist in its reality. Therefore, Kluge is not as equipped as his book intimates to navigating you through the islands.

            The tone of the book is one that has been long abandoned for more even and balanced efforts. The mélange of this book being a sort of neo-Victorian prose, in a way like Conrad’s Marlowe drifting up the river Congo, into the heart of darkness. However, in this region it is still possible and attractive. Stade’s work Pacific Passages, quotes from Kluge’s books several times, and is no doubt a dangerous influence, both in organization and in tone. Both read like a tourist guidebook, and both have the voice of a Victorian Anthropology text.

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