Kiana Davenport and the Mystery of the Missed Climax
Kiana Davenport has been publishing books for over twenty years. In 1994 she published Shark Dialogues, a novel about a multigenerational family. It focuses on Pono, and four of her grandchildren. In 2011 she published Cannibal Nights, Pacific Stories, Volume II, a collection of short fiction about Pacific islanders. In both Shark Dialogues and Cannibal Nights, Davenport introduces conflicts early on and then meanders off. In turn, her original conflict becomes a small part of the whole story. However, when the conflict reaches its climax, as with the mini-conflicts introduced, the book’s audience is left with the same struggle as the people in Pono’s life. A seemingly significant moment is built up then leaves readers with a feeling of the story being unfinished as each of the conflict’s climactic points are underwhelming. For twenty years she has been writing about the problems Pacific island women face, and for twenty years her writing has fallen short in the same places.
In Shark Dialogues, we are given the story of Pono’s struggles through life, and how she must decide whether to tell her children her life story, or to keep her promise with her leper lover Duke to conceal his existence until she dies. Pono’s daughters are summoned home but are not told why: “This homecoming doubly urgent, for Pono had summoned her… Still, it was too soon for Pono to die. Too many questions unanswered, too many mysteries unsolved” (Davenport 9). This is the conflict that is set up in the beginning of the book. Pono has a secret that she has kept even from her children, that her grandchildren are aching to know. Davenport creates the conflict early on. She tells us exactly what to expect from her story.
In her short story “George Bush and Papa at the Paradise” from the Cannibal Nights book, Davenport does the same thing. Vai, a high school graduate in Tonga, doesn’t want to live a hard life filled with manual labor like her mother. Instead, she has gotten a scholarship to Auckland university and will soon be living abroad, “Vai had watched her mother slaving in her four-job life… rising daily at 4 AM” (Davenport Kindle location 691). Vai feels that her mother who embodies traditional qualities, who works, cooks, cleans, and takes care of the children, lives like a slave. “Who cares if the house is untidy. We are Tongan women, not slaves!” (Davenport Kindle location 709). Davenport tells the reader exactly what Vai wants, but then she is prone to meandering off into a long winded history that leaves us wondering what happened to her main characters.
Davenport wants to do everything with her book. She covers more than a hundred years of history and focuses in on the thoughts of her point of view characters. She covers a hundred years in a hundred pages, yet she dwells on the thoughts of Ming, in just a moment, for an entire chapter. As Katherine Min put it in her review of Shark Dialogues, “The excesses of the novel are the excesses of the epic… her determination to work on as large a canvas as possible, to include everything, and to spend it all” (Min). The reader is led through the horrible story of Pono, the years at the cannery, her years as a coolie, the murder of her rape baby, and knows that every story is something that Pono never told, something that the girls are dying to know. “The kitchen was where they discovered their real history… ‘Dat missin’ fingah on yoah tutu’s hand, from pineapple sliceah at Dole Cannery’” (Davenport 7). All the while we are kept wondering what comes next. We wonder why it is that she cannot tell her story. As stated by E.M. Forster this becomes relevant because “we want to know what happens next. That is the universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be the story” (27).
The audience is left wondering how the conflict within Pono will be resolved. Will she tell the girls and reunite her family or will she choose not to, and live alone with her secrets? What is lost that readers are expecting is a character arc from Pono. A character arc, as described by writing instructor K.M. Weiland, goes like this: “1. The protagonist starts one way. 2. The protagonist learns some lessons throughout the story. 3. The protagonist ends in a (probably) better place.” A character arc takes many forms. Certainly, Pono chooses the first path. She decides to take the girls to Duke. She says “There are women locked in my womb forever, the memory of their birth. All I can do now is liberate the fruit of their wombs. And it may be too late” (Davenport 322). In this scene Pono is wondering if telling the girls will go alright. But actually, she has already decided to tell the girls. The climactic moment when Pono struggles with herself, deciding whether she should betray Duke or honor him, is completely skipped over. This missed opportunity is the key moment when the reader can see Pono struggling to change. Pono, who is at first stubborn, becomes someone completely different in the blink of an eye because the conflict set up at the beginning of the novel is replaced with the second and third climactic moments, where Pono tells the girls, and when the family confronts Duke. Davenport misses the dramatic moment, instead choosing to write a book much like a Shakespearean play where action takes place offstage.
In "George Bush," Vai, like Pono is given a rich historical background. As stated earlier, Vai’s story revolves around her distaste of becoming a traditional Tongan woman. Much like in the case of Pono, Davenport gives us the history of Vai’s father Massima who works as a Banana quality control man, Massima’s father who played fangu-fangu, the nose flute, Vai’s cousin Willa who will soon Marry, and Vai’s great-grandmother who died constructing Tongan roads as punishment for adultery. Davenport wants the largest canvas possible. None of these long winded backstories directly contribute to Vai’s decision not to go to college. Because Davenport wants to include so much history, she forgets about what is going on with Vai. Vai is accused of being selfish by her cousin Willa. The once strong and proud Vai becomes full of self doubt. She wonders if going to college is not what’s best for her family, if she should stay in Tonga. Eventually, she decides that she will stay in Tonga, “because there are still my brother and sisters to raise and send to school, I’ve decided to stay home and help Mama… I will not be going to university” (Davenport Kindle location 973). This revelation is fine except that we are never told what makes the Vai from the beginning change into the Vai at the end. Instead, like in Shark Dialogues, Davenport includes the climaxes of other conflicts she has written, writing a rich and arbitrary backstory rather than include the climax of the main conflict, and showing the change of the main character. The decision not to go to college should have been explained throughout the book and we should have been given all the necessary information to understand Vai’s decision for as Kurt Vonnegut said, “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages” (Vonnegut). Not for a moment in the story did I know what Vai was going to do about college. It was never discussed. What was discussed was the conflicts of her ancestors, while the story of Vai slowly became eclipsed. Davenport doesn’t like to give insight directly through her characters, she likes to hide her character’s’ true intentions from the reader.
Not only does Davenport skip over the climax in Shark Dialogues, but we also later learn, through Ming, that the secret of Duke was all a facade to begin with. Davenport had hidden the fact that Ming knew. She had kept a secret from her cousins all along and though she was the voice of integrity that all the cousins looked to, she was unconcerned with the plot of the story all along. Ming describes how, years ago she “took the boat to Moloka’i, the leper settlement. I watched him from a distance for hours… Did you think my father could forget his childhood here? This house… the rumors…” (Davenport 309). In trying to make a plot twist, and in order to push Pono into changing her ways, Davenport decides to leave out crucial information. This quote was taken from Forster talking about a book called Villette by Charlotte Bronte, in an identical case, where the author deliberately leaves out crucial information. “When it comes out, we do get a good plot thrill, but too much at the expense of character… That she stoops to suppress [her character] is a little distressing” (Forster 93). Not letting us know until almost the end of the book, page 309, that one of the girls knew Pono’s secret undermines the main conflict of the entire story. The idea of the secret seems a fabrication. If the information was so easily accessible to Ming, then why was it so hard for generations of other smart women to figure it out?
When the girls finally get their answers, what should be the second climax of the book, where Pono reveals her history to the girls, Davenport again misses the climactic moment. Davenport leads up to the moment, building the tension. Vanya is able to voice the feelings that all the girls have, “Why should we believe you?” and Run Run begins to cry (Davenport 326). This should be a big moment again. This is the moment all the girls have been waiting for. Instead of going into the inner turmoils of each character, Davenport decides to recount, through Pono’s mouth, a history we have already read. Retelling the story we have already read does not contribute to the plot, for as Forster says, “Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides, they must contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised” (85). Pono’s retelling of her story, rather than contributing to the tension of the moment, takes away from the tension. Davenport decides to scope out, and skip the inner turmoil of both Pono, and the girls, which up until then she had been playing into heavily. Instead, on the next page, we get, “She was quiet for a while… she felt magisterial ease… she looked at her granddaughters, and they had changed somewhat, in their faces sorrow, wide-eyed calm. Their bodies now were flung in attitudes of listening” (Davenport 328). Over the course of one page, a page without any insight into how the characters react, without any further fighting, or questioning, the sceptical and untrusting girls give in and the conflict is resolved.
Quick transformations are a mainstay in Davenport’s works. Forster said that characters shouldn’t spend all day on their inner monologues, but he must have meant for there to be some monologue, or else why prohibit its overuse? Sometimes she completely leaves out her character. This is the case with her main character from her short story "Assassin Orders Peking Duck." The point of view character doesn’t have a name, and speaks in the first person. She tells the story of the man who raised her, a cousin named Samuel. Samuel is a war hero who can’t live a civilian life. After finishing his war tours, Samuel settles down in Hawaii and fathers a daughter. Samuel’s daughter goes on spring break in Bali, and is killed in a terrorist bombing. Samuel goes on a hunt for terrorists in the U.S. and after killing three terrorists lets himself be captured by the police and is sent to jail where he lives until he commits suicide.
The story has nothing to do with the point of view character. We never get her name, anything of her personality, or anything to indicate that she is the center of the story. But, rather than the story being wrapped up by Samuel’s death, the story is wrapped up with a change in the narrator, “I kept my promise to Samuel. I let life in. Someone sleeps beside me now… Maybe he is restoring me” (Davenport Kindle Location 642). The character change gets wrapped up in the last few paragraphs of the story. Davenport shows, by putting the character’s change at the end, that the rest of the story had to lead to her change, but it never does. We are never introduced to the character who does not trust men, who does not let life in. The story is so much about Samuel that it excludes any judgement the narrator ever had. In the following quote, the narrator outlines how Samuel hunted down a terrorist: “He called on his training: his senses hyper-alert to stimuli like the dished ruff of an owl… the first man was easy. Samuel followed him and a hooker to a restaurant on the strip… and put a bullet between his eyes.” (Davenport Kindle location 482). That description covers a whole page, and not even once does the narrator stray from recounting the story. She’s a blank. She’s not there, and the story of Samuel eclipses the narrator’s personality. When the story is wrapped up with the Narrator’s change, it’s a shock, as she was never in the story to begin with.
Davenport, somewhere along the way, became overly focused on the grand scheme of things. She forgot to clue us in to the moments where we want to be with her characters the most, the moments where we need to see what goes through their heads. The moment where all their doubts and fears are turned into love and admiration for Pono is glossed over. The moment where Pono realizes that she needs to betray Duke in order to save her girls is lost somewhere in the pages. And in trying to write about everything, Davenport forgets the characters at the heart of her story.
Works Cited
Davenport, Kiana. Cannibal Nights, Pacific Stories, Volume II. Kindle Edition. 2011. Print.
Davenport, Kiana. Shark Dialogues. New York: Atheneum, 1994. Print.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Print.
Min, Katherine. “Shark Dialogues.” Ploughshares 20.⅔ (!994): 241.Academic Search Premier. Web. 5. Feb. 2015.
Vonnegut, Kurt. "Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing." Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing. Web. 1 Apr. 2015.
Weiland, K.M. "Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 1: Can You Structure Characters? - Helping Writers Become Authors." Helping Writers Become Authors. 9 Feb. 2014. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. <http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2014/02/character-arcs-1.html>.
