Kolea: Resisting Transformation in Death in the Mouth

Overview

Kolea is the protagonist of Sloane Leong's story Paradise, the 18th chapter of the anthology Death in the Mouth. She is a Hawaiian woman living alone on a transformed island where her body gradually turns into plant matter—vines replace her hair, roots sprout from her feet, and leaves grow from her eyelids. This transformation began after her younger sister Nakana joined a cult led by a woman named Beacon. Nakana eventually became the agent of a worldwide ecological metamorphosis, spreading spores that turned the landscape into a lush, inhuman paradise. Kolea, determined to resist, survives by isolating herself, wearing a respirator to filter pollen, and living as a scavenger. Her story explores themes of family loyalty, resentment, bodily autonomy, and the cost of defiance.

Plot Role

Kolea appears only in Chapter 18, but her narrative is the emotional core of the anthology's exploration of planetary transformation. She serves as a counterpoint to her sister Nakana: while Nakana embraces change, Kolea fights it. Kolea's journey from resentment to reluctant surrender mirrors the broader tension between human will and natural forces. Her killing of a desperate survivor shows the brutal lengths she will go to remain untransformed, and her final dissolution into the soil represents the ultimate failure (or acceptance) of resistance.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

Kolea's actions reveal a complex mix of defiance, bitterness, and buried care for her sister. Key traits include:

• Defiance: She lives every day untransformed as a "satisfying 'fuck you'" to Nakana. She cuts away the vines growing from her body, even when it causes excruciating pain.
• Resentment: She resents Nakana's perfection—her academic success, her fluency in Hawaiian, her "try-hard kiss-ass" personality. Kolea feels overshadowed and neglected by their parents, who prioritized Nakana's future.
• Survival instinct: She hunts, filters air, flees from feral boars, and kills a pollen-crazed survivor who threatens her. She uses a Hawaiian dictionary as reading material, a quiet act of reconnecting with heritage.
• Anger and grief: She screams curses at Nakana's voice inside her head, hacks at a human-flower corpse, and finally sobs, "I fucking hate you!" when her sister speaks to her.
• Resignation: Despite her defiance, she eventually stops fighting and lets the transformation take her, admitting "there was no point in fighting."

Chronological Arc

Kolea's story unfolds in nonlinear flashbacks within the present-tense narrative of her survival.

1. Before the cult: Kolea and Nakana work at a resort leading kayak tours. Kolea feels inferior to her sister, who is excelling in school and loved by their parents. The family struggles financially in a shack.
2. Meeting Beacon: Beacon, leader of a group called Seekers of Universal Language (SOUL), hires the sisters to catch weke fish for a ritual. Kolea is suspicious and annoyed by Beacon's appropriative comments about Hawaiian spirituality. Nakana becomes intrigued.
3. Nakana's transformation: Nakana joins the cult, eating the toxic fish and undergoing a metamorphosis that allows her to grow fruit from her body and spread spores across the island. Kolea watches helplessly as her sister becomes the catalyst for global ecological change.
4. Years of survival: Kolea lives alone, wearing a respirator, cutting her plant-hair, and avoiding other survivors. Her feet begin to root, her legs go numb, and she hears Nakana's voice urging her to give in.
5. Final struggle: A desperate survivor finds her tent; she kills him with a spear when he threatens her. She later encounters a human-flower corpse—a transformed person—and destroys it in rage. Her legs fully root, and she hears Nakana's voice saying, "This is where we belong." Kolea begs to be let go but is paralyzed as her body unravels into roots and merges with the soil. The world becomes "perfect, silent and green."

Relationships

• Nakana (sister): The central relationship. Kolea both loves and resents Nakana. She feels her parents favored Nakana and that her sister's competence overshadowed her own. Nakana's choice to join Beacon and transform the world is a betrayal that Kolea can never forgive. Yet Nakana's voice—the transformed sister—continues to call Kolea, offering a twisted reunion at the end.
• Beacon: A wealthy white tourist who leads the SOUL cult. Kolea finds her condescending and appropriative, especially when Beacon comments on Hawaiian spirituality as "embryonic." Beacon's influence over Nakana is the catalyst for disaster.
• Parents: They are mentioned only in memory. They poured resources into Nakana's education, leaving Kolea to fend for herself. Their expectations and comparisons fuel Kolea's low self-esteem.
• The survivor: An unnamed haole (white) man who stumbles into Kolea's territory, crazed by pollen and desperate. Kolea kills him when he threatens her with a rifle. This act underscores her willingness to do violence to preserve her autonomy.

Key Decisions and Consequences

Theme and Symbol Connections

Kolea's character ties directly to several themes of Death in the Mouth:

• Transformation: Kolea's body is a battleground between human form and plant life. She fights change, but the story suggests transformation is inevitable and not necessarily evil. The transformed world is beautiful and healed—free of pollution—yet Kolea refuses it on principle. Her final acceptance mirrors the anthology's exploration of change as both loss and renewal. For more on this, see the Transformation page.
• Trauma and Memory: Kolea is haunted by memories of her sister's betrayal and her parents' neglect. She replays the past obsessively, even as her body decays. The Trauma and Memory theme explores how characters are trapped by their histories.
• Identity and Otherness: Kolea feels other within her own family and culture—she is pale-skinned, straight-haired, and "never one for community." Beacon's exoticizing remarks make her feel further alienated. The Identity and Otherness theme resonates strongly.
• Revenge and Justice: Kolea's resistance is partly revenge against Nakana. She calls the transformed world "this paradisiacal hell" and lives to spite her sister. But her final surrender suggests that revenge is hollow when the world itself has changed. See Revenge and Justice.
• Family Bonds: The sisterly bond is both toxic and unbreakable. Kolea cannot escape Nakana's influence even in isolation. The story questions what we owe family members who have harmed us. More at Family Bonds.

5 Book-Specific Questions and Answers

1. Why does Kolea resent her sister Nakana?
Kolea resents Nakana because their parents poured all their resources into Nakana's education and future, leaving Kolea to feel neglected. Nakana was the overachiever—straight A's, Hawaiian immersion, volunteer work—while Kolea struggled in underfunded schools and ended up in hotel work. She also inherited their father's Germanic features, making her feel like an outsider in her own culture compared to Nakana's "loamy rich skin" and "perfect long Hawaiian hair."

2. What does the weke fish symbolize in the story?
The weke fish are central to the cult ritual. They are poisonous when eaten near bedtime and are associated with nightmares in Hawaiian lore. Beacon buys them from the sisters for a ritual meant to "decouple the self from the ego." The weke represent the dangerous intersection of indigenous knowledge and colonial appropriation, as well as the sisters' complicity in their own destruction for money.

3. How does Kolea's Hawaiian identity affect her actions?
Kolea's relationship with her heritage is conflicted. She knows Hawaiian but feels disgust speaking it to tourists who only appreciate it as performance. She reads a half-burned Hawaiian dictionary in her tent, using it to feel close to her culture when alone. Yet she resists Beacon's appropriation and corrects her subtly about Hawaiian polytheism. Her identity is a source of both pride and pain.

4. Is Kolea's transformation a punishment or a liberation?
Interpretation varies. On one hand, Kolea experiences it as a slow death—loss of mobility, pain, and dissolution into soil. She fights it to the end. On the other hand, the transformed world is ecologically healed and beautiful. Nakana's voice says, "This is where we belong," suggesting unity with nature. The story leaves it ambiguous: Kolea's last emotions are hate, fear, and regret, but the final image is "perfect, silent and green." The Ending Explained page offers further discussion.

5. What role does Beacon play in Nakana's transformation?
Beacon is the wealthy outsider who introduces Nakana to the idea of listening to nature through psychedelic plant experiences. She appropriates Hawaiian spirituality, calling it "embryonic," and uses local knowledge (the weke fish's toxic properties) to facilitate her group's ritual. Nakana becomes a devoted follower, and Beacon's influence directly leads to Nakana's transformation into a spore-spreading being. Kolea blames Beacon for "the woman-worm that had burrowed in Nakana's ear."

For further exploration of these themes and more questions, see the Questions and Answers page and the main book page.