Medical Trauma and Spatial Isolation in Alan Brennert’s Moloka’i

Abstract

American Literature is a unique literature, predominantly written or produced in the United States of America and its preceding colonies. Alan Brennert an American author exhaustively screens out the nineteenth-century untold Hawaiian leper colony. Brennert’s powerful and scrupulous fiction Moloka’i encapsulates the horrors of the disease in order to build up the enticing story in the Hawaiian Island. Nature is beautiful not only because it meets one’s several needs and paves way to render the feeling of bliss but it also helps people to connect with their true ‘selves’. Through different dimensions, it focuses on how nature stands as a healer in a Pacific paradise. The people of Hawaii spin with an exile, widowed, orphaned, legally dead, and physically dying with Hansen’s disease and struck root in a new community, Kalaupapa. In the novel Brennert conveys the effects of Hansen disease, instead of living in a co-dwelling family that men and women live in separate colonies, whose children are removed soon after birth to prevent diseases. The present paper explores the touching account of a seven-year-old Rachel who undergoes sterlization when she rises above the limitations of a devastating illness and isolation within Kalaupapa community.