This is Paradise and the Movement in a Still Object
"Portrait of a Good Father" by Kristiana Kahakauwila (found in the collection This Is Paradise) is a short story that takes place over many years, following different family members as they cope, or fail to cope, with a traumatic loss. It's devastating.
The story opens with a longish description of a photograph, a still object. I think many writers would avoid this sort of beginning—we're often told that a story should start with action, with immediate stakes. And many excellent short stories do start with action.
But there is much that is wonderful about starting with stillness: the atmosphere it creates, the tension, the potential energy that might burst into kinetic at any moment. Or maybe it won't.
Kahakauwila embraces that stillness, but she also appeases a desire that many readers may have for action, just through different means. There are many ways this still object is moving and changing.
Let's look at a passage:
The photograph hung for years in the screened-in porch beside their family kitchen. Even in Sarah’s earliest recollections, the image is faded from sunlight: her father’s deep brown skin has taken on a grayish hue, the white plumeria around his neck appears to have withered and yellowed, and his black, wavy hair is frosted with white. Humidity has caused the photograph to curl from its backing and bubble slightly in its gilded frame, lending the impression that Keaka is turning toward her. In the photograph, Sarah’s father is nineteen. He is a little thick in the middle, and his hair has already begun to withdraw from its original line like an army in retreat. But he is unmistakably handsome: his aliʻi nose, flat and wide—the nose of King Kalākaua’s line—flares slightly; his full lips are set in a mysterious smile; his chest is broad and hairless with dark, tight nipples. He is squinting slightly into the sun, and the photographer has caught him at a moment of introspection, at an angle, so Sarah can see his left earlobe.
Sarah will spend many hours staring at the photograph while she waits for her father: waits for him to cook her oatmeal before school, to figure out her math homework so he can explain it to her, to come home for dinner, or dessert, or afterward, when it’s time to put her to bed. During these hours of waiting, she will memorize the lines of her father’s neck, the way he tilts his head to the side as if falling into the sunlight, the smile that teases his lips. She will study the curve of his eyebrows, thick like hers, and the bulge of his biceps, similar to her older brother’s. She will know the photograph as intimately as she knows her own self.
In later years, when she is in college on the mainland, and her roommates ask for a description of her parents—she has brought no pictures of them, only pictures of her high school friends—she will describe her father as he appeared in that photograph, at nineteen, before she was born.
The most obvious movement, perhaps, is the way the narrator pulls the reader's attention along the picture. When we move from the father's skin to his neck to his hair, or from his nose to his lips to his chest, it's as if our eyes are tracing lines and features. Of course, this is often considered a limitation of the medium of writing. We must take in three-dimensional objects one word at a time. But when describing something still, it creates a sense of our observations creeping over the surface. Instead of a quick snapshot, the movement is in our exploration of that object.
Another way the still object moves is through time. Or perhaps I've said that backwards. Time stands still in a photo and so we can see the movement of time around it. The description of the rolling edges, caused by humidity, gestures to this, along with the fading of colors, the bubbling of the paper. The fading of the photograph mirrors and emphasizes the aging of the human body in the photograph—the skin, the hairline. The color-fading flowers are also withering.
And of course we feel time move as the same photograph is looked at in different situations, over the years. I love that the narrator talks about looking at it while "waiting" as that emphasizes stillness, even as time itself won't be still. Kahakauwila creates movement through times of day by listing the meals and the tasks.
Then, time makes a bigger jump to when Sarah is at college. Even the years have moved. And in that movement, the photograph transforms profoundly. Instead of existing on the curling paper, the image emerges in Sarah's mind. The picture transforms from object to abstraction. It has both lost its permanence—its stillness—and gained a different sort of the same thing.
I also love thinking about how the photograph might remain the same but the perspective on it changes. A description is always about not just an object but the character who describes it.
Here, Sarah's father considers it.
He has to admit he likes the photo. He likes the faraway expression on his face. He likes that, for many years, the image pissed off his mother-in-law, who thought it shameful to have a picture of him “half naked like a native” hanging where everyone could see it. When they had family gatherings, he always made a point of showing off the photo. Only one aspect of the image bothers him: it makes him long for something he can’t name. He remembers the day Grace took the picture of him. He had wanted to go fishing with his friends, but after being out all night with Joon, it hadn’t seemed right. He was feeling so bad about Joon that when Grace asked him to run to the grocery store for more raspberry jam, he bought a lei, too, from the case of flowers at the front of Safeway. Back home, Grace was sitting in the living room watching television.
This passage gives us more about the father and the family than I will detail here—but look at how the image stands still as the family's history and dynamics and relationships roil around it. We get not just the father's take on the picture but what he imagines his mother-in-law thinks of it and thus of him. We get his inner thoughts as well his way of presenting himself—his defiance—through the action of display. We also get a complicated and emotionally fraught memory of the day it was taken.
The picture is still. Yet in so many ways, it moves.