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I have fond memories of Hawaii’s romance with Jamaica. It started in the early 1980’s. It was a romance kindled by reggae.

I was among the smitten ones, skanking to Jah music, as the patois phrase went, meaning you planted your feet, opened your body to the undulating rhythm and wrapped your faith around the rebel joy of the lyrical legacy of Bob Marley. Bob was gone by then, having succumbed to cancer, but before he left, he unleashed searing anthems to “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights….” Commercial radio stations wouldn’t touch such in-your-face fare, and commercial radio was just about the only way that music made it out of recording studios and into the ears of an audience back then.

So the fact that reggae reached us anyway in the middle of the vast Pacific was more than a clue that Hawaii and Jamaica shared not only the same lush beauty and agreeable tropical latitude, but also a certain attitude about the lingering injustices of colonialism. Non-white islanders had suffered this legacy for generations and shared stories of their losses on the margins of society where their voices had been relegated. Now suddenly here were reggae lyrics telling it as it was, bursting with the 411 from boomboxes that could not be ignored.

I am not Native Hawaiian, but Hawaii’s early reggae crowd was. Hawaiian youths, in fact, became more than fans by inventing their own reggae hybrid — Jawaiian music. I never surfed, but to be pressed up against the stage in a tide of dancers mesmerized by the pounding drum and bass line at one of those Jawaiian concerts was about as close as I will ever get (in this lifetime) to catching a monster wave. Yup, it was an exhilarating ride, worth any risk, because it seemed as natural as Mother Nature herself. Reggae rained down on us like a mystical tonic for whatever ailed the island world. Perhaps Marley best explained the music’s uncanny appeal to islanders appeal by chorusing, “He who feels it, knows it.”

In 1990, I was host of a reggae program on Hawaii Public Radio, when I got a call from Esther Figueroa. I don’t recall her mentioning much about her impressive bio—that she was an accomplished author, poet, scholar with a Ph.D. in linguistics, and a filmmaker, now living in Honolulu. She told me she was from Jamaica, though her lilting accent had already given me a clue. She viewed Hawaii’s spontaneous combustion of affection for reggae as a conduit for shedding light on the structural and historical connectivity between the Pacific and the Caribbean—something that was not widely acknowledged then. It was certainly not in the high school history books of all those adolescent Jawaiian acoloytes gathered for jams at Aloha Tower.

Figgie, as she liked to be called, had shrewd insight to offer when controversy broke out over Jawaiian music. Why would Hawaiian youths go so far as to grow dreadlocks and pepper their local pidgin with Jamaican patois? Some Hawaiian cultural purists were concerned that they were forgoing their own identity in pursuit of a mere music fad. Native identity had been undergoing a long re-birth ever since the ’70s ushered in an effort to revive Hawaiian cultural practices eclipsed in America’s overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Jamaica’s spiritually-attuned Rastafarian reggae masters also extolled a return to cultural roots. But the difference was that they were talking about sailing back across the Atlantic to Africa, from where their ancestors were taken away by Europeans to become the slave labor, which would be the engine of New World commerce.

So, yes, one group yearned to go home while the other had never left ancestral soil. Their respective struggles were not identical. However, Figgie maintained that the historical similarities between Jamaica and Hawaii were deeper than the dissimilarities.

Figueroa viewed Hawaii’s spontaneous combustion of affection for reggae as a conduit for shedding light on the structural and historical connectivity between the Pacific and the Caribbean — something not widely acknowledged in the early ’90s.

The controversy took center stage at a Windward Community College symposium convened to debate reggae’s impact in Hawaii. Figgie was part of the event. She filmed it, just as she had filmed her talks with Jamaica’s great reggae masters who had started headlining at Hawaii concerts in front of sellout crowds. Figgie interviewed the likes of Jimmy Cliff and Marcia Griffiths and others during their local tours, eliciting their thoughts on the interisland love affair; they saw what she saw in the late 20^th century: The landscapes and lives of most non-white people in Jamaica and Hawaii were dominated by sugar and tourism. These private enterprises had nominally replaced the plantations of the colonizers, but the plantation mentality was still as alive and well, as some of the most strident reggae made it out to be.

Figgie was making progress on a full-scale documentary about the new kinship between her homeland and Hawaii. She even arranged to book Jawaiian bands Kapena and Ho’aikane on the bill at the 1991 Reggae Sunsplash in Jamaica. This would have given her a chance to film Hawaiian groups on stage for the first time ever at the world’s largest and most important reggae festival, but self-styled music managers were beginning to circle this juicy little music scene with more concerns for profit than prophetic lyrics, and this somehow nixed plans for the Jawaiian jaunt to Jamaica.

The Jawaiian debate cooled as reggae artists pumped out more commercially viable hits and in Hawaii the music went totally mainstream — as in totally acceptable at baby luau parties down the beach and backyard family barbecues. I lost touch with Figgie and only later would find out that she continued her push for advancing a better understanding of Caribbean and Pacific connectivity by working on the Islands of Globalization Project comprised of scholars supporting an exchange of artistic and educational activities in the two regions.

I have never stopped loving reggae music, but somewhere over the years, I began feeling pretty naïve looking back at my passionate insistence that the Jamaican-born sound could save the island world. At some point, I realized that the island world was truly at risk. About five years ago, it became obvious, for example, that climate change is bearing down disproportionately hard on tropical islands, due to unchecked fossil fuel emissions belching from the industrialized cities of colonizing nations. It’s painful to realize that the obvious 21^st century link between Jamaica and Hawaii is not just the legacy of colonial history but a shared fight to retain habitable environments in the future.

So I have been given to wonder why couldn’t we have done more to leverage that old reggae romance into a lasting relationship that would protect our island worlds?

This question weighed on my mind as I read Figueroa’s newly published environmentally themed novel. In fall 2013, she prepared the book for publication while holding the position of visiting distinguished writer at the University of Hawaii-Manoa English department. Figgie’s book is called “Limbo: A Novel About Jamaica” (Arcade Publishing, 2014). This title is a loaded word for Jamaicans as the limbo dance is said to have originated during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It’s a title that symbolizes the enduring struggles of Jamaicans to break free from the brutality of the past, but have no fear, this “Limbo” is no drudging polemic; the pages turn breezily. As with reggae music, the message is there but it is wrapped in a gregarious rhythm.

Limbo’s heroine is a likeable Flora Smith. A scientist and a director of an environmental non-profit, she is put into a cascade of events where she cannot manage her own life with integrity unless she also walks the talk of her cause. This means taking a stand against island-bred cronyism and corruption, which have paved the way for multinational corporations to erect mega-luxury resorts for foreigners and further marginalize Jamaicans.

Through Flora’s eyes, we get a distressing portrait of collusion between local and foreign power brokers hell-bent on transforming Jamaica into a hot real estate boon for the super wealthy while they make their deals without a lick of conscience and decimate the natural resources that are also Jamaica’s root of natural community and traditional culture.

Sound familiar?

Yes, it should, now that Oahu homeless encampments sprawl in the shadows of shore-front high-rises built for billionaires only — even millionaires scarcely need apply. As I sat one Saturday afternoon reading “Limbo” on the beach at Sand Island with a view of dozens of construction cranes crowding out the mauka profile, I rued the fact that reggae’s power wasn’t enough to … ahh … “chase ‘dem crazy baldheads out of the town now…” But as much as “Limbo’s” plot made me squirm with some regrets, the book manages to shine a light on an enduring bond between Jamaica and Hawaii.

This happens in a moment near the end of the novel, so take this as a spoiler alert: “Limbo’s” heroine Flora ultimately turns her full attention to the Jamaican countryside and decides to — as we might say, go holo holo.

After facing down near natural armageddon of Jamaica’s Northcoast beaches, she sinks into a luminous reverie about the future of environmental activism on her island and realizes that you can wrap your love around an island — as you just can’t around a continent; that the family “ties that bind” are much tighter on an island, because there is no place to run and no place to hide — and that this has implications for anyone hoping to hide their wrongdoing; that in the small space of an island, what goes around comes around very quickly — so you better be prepared for what you have sent around; that the beauty of an island swells the eyes of the greedy so that they cannot even see what it is they steal; that islanders are not immune to the blindness of greed; that islands are so very isolated that sometimes we feel isolated inside; that in spite of all, island love is real; that we must feel the love, if we are going to save the island environment; that we must do it, because no one else can; that islands and their circularity lead us back to where we started, including back to ourselves, and this is where we can stand in the light with our allies.

This is what is striking to me about Figueroa’s “Limbo.” More than dreary news reports, more than history books, more than tsunamis of opinions on any social media channel, it holds up the truth of island life with the velvet glove of art. It reminds me that if I really want energy to stop environmental cataclysm, it is OK to lay down the hammer of facts and find fun and fellowship in sharing the truth with one another.

Art in service of activism is a powerful catalyst. It reminded me to “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights … and don’t give up the fight…” And as hard as the fight may be, don’t forget to dance because others are dancing, too. Even if they are on the other side of the planet, they are united with us in island love.

Figueroa will read from “Limbo: A Novel About Jamaica” and sign books on Friday, Sept. 4, starting at 5:30 p.m. at the University of Hawaii-Manoa Department of English, Kuy 410. The evening will also feature Shawna Yang Ryan, author of the novel, “Water Ghosts,” reading from her soon-to-be-published novel, “Green Island,” and the poetic voices of Rajiv Mohavir and Raindrop Wright-Cannon.