Sharks In The Time Of Saviors

Throughout the novel the characters refer to “callings” from mystical voices that compel them to take actions. These callings often emanate from the land, as Malia reveals in Chapter 1: “The kingdom of Hawaii had long been broken—the breathing rain forests and singing green reefs crushed under the haole fists of beach resorts and skyscrapers—and that was when the land had begun calling” (3).

When he is at his lowest point after the death of the pregnant woman, Nainoa plays his ukulele and remembers the beaches, rainforests, and sunsets of his childhood back in Hawai‘i: “I played and remembered all of this, and the memories became a calling, not a voice but instead a very distant urge that set in my sternum and started to spread like medicine until it was pulling at my mind, directly. Home. Come Home” (168). He answers this pull, deciding to leave Portland and return to Hawai‘i.

Asked why he decided to return to the islands, Nainoa tells his mother that he just had a feeling he needed to come home. His mother tells him, “That feeling, it’s something speaking, Noa. So listen” (177). A short time later, when Nainoa has a feeling that he must hike in the Waipi‘o Valley, he takes his mother’s advice and listens to it. He dies during the hike, and his mother later has guilty feelings about encouraging him to go. However, she tells Kaui, “He was called there […] He was feeling it strong once he got home. The valley was where he needed to be” (196).

In the next to last chapter, Kaui says she and other local Hawaiians have answered a calling to create new local farms: “They’d been called, too, is what they said. That same voice, the one that came to me like a hula, that came through Dad like a river” (362). Later, when she asks her brother Dean to come home, she says, “Does it call you now, too?” (363). Dean’s promise to consider returning home may suggest that he has indeed heard the call himself.