An English wit, Samuel Johnson once described the essay as:
a loose sully of the mind; an irregular indigested piece
…Of shit!, the good Doctor seemed to imply, in the parlance of the eighteenth century.
This piece isn’t quite that (one should hope). But it is loose and irregular: part travel memoir, part psychological profile of the author, part book review, part pop-art criticism, part history, part myth.
It’s an essai, in the French from whence it came—an attempt; a weighing (an assaying); a trying on of hats.
I have tried, in my way, to make sense of Hawaiian myth and history; through my personal logic of myth and history.
Basically, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve known, and seen, and heard and read, of the Hawaiian Islands. In particular, the “Garden Isle,” Kauai, the Eden of which I am fondest, during the pandemic.
If there is a thread of continuity in this work, it is, god help the reader: me. Any oversights, under-sights, misinterpretations, misprisions, privileged assumptions, sexualizing of the landscape, ideations, chauvinisms, or midlife juvenilia are all mine to claim, and yours to forgive, or not. As you like it.
Another structural thread, or theme, is the scaffolding of myth; constructing a poetics of place. The story of place, especially a place such as Hawaii, cannot be covered in blanket statements, cut from whole cloth. It, too, is something irregular, patched together from pieces and scraps—religious, cultural, historical, popular, personal, professional. This piece (the essay) weighs some of those pieces.
I do not claim absolute historical accuracy or purity of insight for all of the empirical observations or historical recollections contained within. Yet neither is this cultural mosaic invented ex nihilo. Assume a good-faith attempt on my part, to research and report what interests me about Hawaii, what I’ve seen with my own eyes, what I’ve read and overheard, and present these through a work of art.
This is Hanalei, Kauai, and other pieces of the archipelago, through the looking glass of a mural-mosaic I once saw there.
A mural of Jimi Hendrix.
I Myself Have Seen It
“…I did not want to make the mistake of imagining that myth was something available to everyone. I understood that myth was a luxury.”
—Susanna Moore, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii
This is the epiphany of Susanna Moore, the novelist and mythographer of modern Hawaii, which dawned on her one morning, after a night spent sipping beer and pineapple wine, listening to “talking-story,” slack-key guitar and ukulele, partaking of hula on the grass, in the place where she grew up.
Maturing in midcentury Honolulu, Moore became intimately familiar with all the connotations of modern “myth,” as that word applies to the islands, and added a few of her own.
In this chapter (“The Musician”), of her semi-autobiographical essays, I Myself Have Seen It, Moore invokes myth as a strategy for becoming “connected to this Earth.” For most, this is the luxury hardest to come by in Western modernity, especially the sort of Natural Mysticism for which Hawaii is known.
For sake of caricature, a stereotypical tourist’s impression of the sort of earthiness mainlanders often associate with Hawaii, I offer you my recollection of two locals, Kauai women, as they reacted to the miraculous return of emerald sea turtles on Poipu beach. A happy side effect, after several-months relief from tourist pressure on that island, due to pandemic.
One local was haole (white), the other was of Pacific ancestry. The turtles, three or four of them, were lounging on the sand late in the June day. Several more were making their way to the beach through the tidewater.
The haole woman became a sort of turtle lifeguard, alerting distracted tourists to the fact that they were inches away from treading on one of several enormous, living tortoise shells. (To the absent mind, they were easily mistaken for smooth igneous rocks hulking out of the sand.)
Without a clue (without a doubt), several tourists were about to step on Hawaii’s totem sea creature.
Wanting a whistle, the turtle lifeguard shrieked instead—SIR! MA’AM! YOU—BOOGIE BOARDER WITH THE BLUE SHORTS! (Watch out for the turtles.)
She also played the role of oral historian, remembrancer of recent natural history, recounting the story of how and why the turtles had returned (Coronavirus), and why the recent influx of vaccinated humans was ruining the likelihood of their remaining.
One after another, the large haole woman summoned a small crowd of tourist onlookers, who basked in the smug illusion that as long as the local woman was lamenting human carelessness to them, she wasn’t talking about them—until the tourists grew bored and uncomfortable in the realization that, they too, were careless humans.
So one crowd drifted away, so another approached to gawk at the Jeremiad of the sea tortoise. The local white woman did this every afternoon, and unless the turtles (or the tourists) have gone, neither has she.
The other woman took a different approach. She spread awareness by modeling enthusiasm, encouraging beachcombers to marvel at the semi-divine beings at their feet, before they tripped over them, cooing rhetorical questions like, “Aren’t they wonderful?” and “Do you guys realize how special this is?”
Like the haole woman, she too informed the uninitiated that this phenomenon was recent and rare, that if people maintained a respectful distance, the turtles might keep returning to the sands of Poipu, on the island of Kauai.
After the brief Public Service Announcement, the woman knelt in the sand next to the largest female, intoned a prayerful tortoise oli (prayer chant) with outstretched arms, then clasped her hands, stood, and left.
Both women, in their own way, evinced mana—the concept of Polynesian spiritual animism permeating all things, including those beatific green sea turtles.
I suspect most visitors prefer their Hawaiian spirituality performed by a polite brown woman with Polynesian phenotypes and a voice full of aloha, but, regardless, it’s taken for granted that the mythographer Susanna Moore’s “connection to this Earth” prevails among all who dwell in one of the most beautiful and welcoming parts of it. Reverence for the natural world is assumed to be part of Hawaii’s mytho-cultural DNA.
Anyone venturing outside the ersatz Polynesia of the Aulani Disney Resort and Spa (on Oahu) can’t help but marvel at the natural world of Hawaii, and wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that this natural mystique is available to everyone everywhere, or that it is anything but a luxury to exist here.
But one could argue, Susanna Moore’s insight notwithstanding, that myth itself, in a variety of other forms, is available and desirable to everyone.
Some wags have suggested that the global preoccupation with the Marvel Cinematic Universe—with its galaxy of superheroes—represents a mythic impulse, and I wouldn’t quibble with the veracity of that suggestion. We all have our heroes and legends.
Claude Levi Strauss, the famous structural anthropologist, argued that myth-making is akin to bricolage—the act of arranging found objects into a coherent work of art.
Under this theory, a culture takes whatever aesthetic bric-á-brac is available to it, and repurposes these materials to construct a framework of symbolic meaning—a story, essentially, that meets that culture’s psychological needs and desires.
That is Claude Levi-Strauss’s concept of myth, or part of it.
American pop culture is a junkyard of such found, and discarded, objects, a veritable street market of menagerie trinkets and lesser objets de art, the contemporary building blocks of bricolage.
One could argue, for example, that the 2021 Netflix original Finding ‘Ohana (aside from satisfying Netflix’s psychological desire for market share and ratings), satisfies an insatiable American desire for armchair adventure and watered-down exoticism, for which the islands have long been a plaything.
Finding ‘Ohana is also a self-conscious reboot of Goonies, with shades of Indiana Jones, recast with “Hawaiian” characters (some of whom are passing for Puerto Rican in the plot line ), to satisfy a more-recent American desire for multiculturalism (aimed at an increasingly-diverse paying audience). Some of the pop-mythology puzzle pieces have been substituted or rearranged, but overall the picture is strikingly familiar.
Finding ‘Ohana is not the sort of “myth” Susanna Moore claims as a luxury unavailable to all—“If we take for myth an explanation of the natural world and how it came into being;” or “the means by which the transcendent idea of existence is both reaffirmed and protected;” or “a theatrical ritual that transforms the mystery of the heroic into the sacred and magical;” or “an exaltation of the primeval reality that satisfies moral cravings as well as practical needs,” in her various definitions.
But it is an example of the American entertainment industry recycling the bric-á-brac of popular culture into a shallower, if slightly-updated, version of Robert Louis Stevensons’s Treasure Island, for 21st-century audiences. Cinema aside, which is more amenable to observation than participation, interesting—sometimes incredible—developments occur when one culture borrows pieces of another’s myths, and repurposes them to its own needs (consciously or not).
Fine Young Cannibals
The first white man on the historical record to encounter the Hawaiian archipelago, Captain James Cook, stumbled across the islands in 1778, when he sighted the mountainous island of Oahu from afar, and made landfall on the island of Kauai shortly afterwards.
But Cook truly stumbled into the myth of Hawaii ten months later, after he returned from charting the Pacific Northwest. When he landed on the Big Island of Hawaii, as a resurrected “god.”
The Englishman’s slight-return happened to coincide with a four-month long Hawaiian religious festival, known as the Makahiki, when locals celebrated the return of their long-absent rain and fertility god, Lono.
Lono was believed to visit the islands sequentially, in a counterclockwise fashion.
Cook, coincidentally, circumnavigated the archipelago in a counterclockwise fashion, before he anchored off Hawaii island.
The white sails and wooden masts of the HMS Discovery and Voyager also happened to resemble the religious icons of Lono—white kapa cloth stretched over a wooden frame.
If that wasn’t fortuitous enough, in Hawaiian prophecy, Lono was rumored to be fair-skinned.
Because Cook returned at an auspicious time of year, unwittingly reenacted the counterclockwise route of Lono’s return, and resembled certain attributes of the harvest god, he was mistaken for an avatar of the rain god himself.
Some scholars contend that the narrative of a light-complexioned deity, which predated and paved the way for Cook, possibly stems from a previous, unrecorded Hawaiian encounter with Spanish or Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century.
This begs the question, whether an unrecorded encounter also transpired in Mexico, one that might have inspired a similar Aztec myth, about a white Quetzalcoatl, that insinuated Hernán Cortes into the Halls of Montezuma.
Whatever the inspiration, whether these uncanny narratives were projected from the past onto the present by indigenous storytellers, or from the present onto the past by early modern historians, the Englishman, like the Spaniard, inadvertently became the stuff of local legend.
However the fates of James Cook and Hernán Cortes were very different.
While ‘Lono’ was initially received with reverence and celebration on his return to Hawaii, his avatar Captain Cook wore out his welcome within a month, eating the natives out of house and home.
When Cook’s ships set sail in February of 1779, rough seas forced them to return less than a week later. The inhabitants of Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, were less than impressed.
A rain god thwarted by inclement weather?
They had also witnessed the mortality of several Englishmen during Cook’s stay, and grown suspicious of their captain’s divinity.
A series of misunderstandings involving a stolen dinghy, and a British threat to hold a Hawaiian chief hostage until the purloined boat was returned, devolved into a violent struggle.
Captain Cook was fatally stabbed and/or pummeled. On a beach near Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Although the British and Hawaiians had grown reciprocally weary of each other, Cook’s mortal remains were treated with the dignity and respect due a great Hawaiian ali’i (chief)—from the Hawaiian perspective.
His flesh was roasted from the bones in a shallow pit, that his skeletal remains might be preserved as sacred relics.
Instead of hoarding these relics—ostensibly those of Lono himself, the mana of rain and fertility—the Hawaiians gifted most of Cook’s earthly remains to his countrymen, out of respect.
Though it was rumored that one young warrior, the future King Kamehameha, kept Cook’s scalp.
Rather than keeping these sacred remains as the Hawaiians would, the British navy promptly committed Cook’s remains to the waters of Kealakekua Bay.
That is how Captain Cook was absorbed by Hawaiian mythology, and the Pacific Ocean.
On a recent visit to Kauai, en route to a float trip down a network of nineteenth-century, sugarcane irrigation canals, one mainlander on the shuttle to the canal posed a leading question.
“What actually happened to Captain Cook?,” a tourist asked our guide.
The young Kauaian (half indigenous, half Filipino), a recent veteran of the U.S. Army, quipped, (without missing a beat):
“WE ATE HIM.”
While this is not empirically true, it is revealing. (And hilarious — one “H” away from “ We Hate him.”)
In the minds of outsiders and locals alike, the Hawaiians cannibalized James Cook.
Figuratively at least, this is true. The Hawaiians did consume Cook: his death became part of Hawaiian legend. In this sense, Cook was ‘cooked,’ and ‘eaten.’
The imperial interloper got his just deserts, is one interpretation.
The cannibalism trope seems to underscore this, never mind that the cannibalism never occurred, and no later Europeans were ‘cooked’ (given funeral rites involving the ritual burning of flesh) after Cook, in the Hawaiian islands.
(Ritual cannibalism was, historically, part of Polynesian culture, and artifactual remains of pre-European cannibalism have been excavated in Hawaii, however.)
After the mishap with Cook, Hawaiians and Britons were careful not to offend one another, let alone eat each other.
Nevertheless, the tour guides seemed to relish the misconception.
As we plopped into our inner tubes, another young guide smiled at us. Cracking jokes, she told us what to expect, tubing down an irrigation canal hand-dug by Chinese laborers some hundred-and-forty years ago.
In addition to other body modifications (like tattoos, which also have their origin in Polynesian culture), the guide’s front incisors were filed into sharp points—like the teeth of Queequeg, in Moby Dick.
Ishmael’s cannibal bedfellow.
“The Story of Life” (I Am You Searching to Be Free)
Kauai Island, June 29, 2021
Riding the first Big Wave (of tourists, flooding back into the Hawaiian Islands), after the last Big Wave (of Coronavirus statistics, finally beginning to subside), I stood leaning against the white wooden banister of a storefront. Probably a surf shop, in old town Hanalei.
A sun-scorched, dry afternoon, unusual for Hanalei Bay, abutting the “wettest spot on earth,” Mount Wai’ale’ale (“Rippling Waters”). And other mist-veiled mountains, whose verdant décolletage is usually laced with the liquid pearls of rain-fed waterfalls. Precipitous chutes, communicating the clouds to earth.
Today, all but one of those celestial wells had run dry.
The rains were falling instead on the nominally-dry, southwest side of the island. Where five Oregonians, myself included, had departed sometime after sunrise, to make the drive north to Hanalei, before daily road closures took effect at 7:45 am.
The road closures had nothing to do with the recent plague, which was just another in a long chain of pathogenic invasions to reach the islands since the arrival of the Clap in 1778.
Later, on our final drive, to Lihue airport and all points east, my then-wife and I would listen to a radio Public Service Announcement, warning sexually active Kauaians to take prophylactic measures against an even more recent wave, of gonorrhea. Full circle.
The Kuhio Highway was intermittently closed—above one of the most picturesque highway descents in the world, into the taro fields of Hanalei valley—due to mudslides that ravaged the hillsides earlier that spring.
Instead of flaunting her falling waters, the valley behind the bay revealed scars of red earth. The most beautiful box of rain on the planet, Hanalei was somehow displaying the effects of too much, and not enough, precipitation at once.
Wet or dry, I felt the joy of slight return.
After a breakfast stop for coffee and banana bread, we continued northwest, past Hanalei, over one-lane bridges and languid streams, to Tunnels Beach.
An empty parking spot was waiting across the highway from the gaping mouth of a terrestrial cave, so we took it, trekked a quarter mile up the beach, and turned the kids on to a morning snorkel.
Afterwards, we drove back to eat plate lunches in the shade beneath the Hanalei pier. Post-picnic, we jumped off the top deck into the bay, swam, and pushed the shorties into their first surf, on our stand-up paddle boards, which had proven otherwise useless, in the strong offshore winds that made sails of us all.
In the dusty shade of the shops afterwards, I was facing the homestretch of a nominally-perfect day.
We were due back in the line of cars queueing at the highway flags by 5:30 pm, when HIDOT would reopen the artery to-and-from the valley for the final time that day.
Despite doubts about the excursion, fed by poolside gossip at the hotel back down south, concerning terrible wait times and traffic up north, the morning drive to Hanalei was a breeze; the delay at the roadblock lasted all of ten minutes. We figured we’d time it the same on the way out—early.
I had two pandemic hours to kill. There are worse places to be stranded.
Hunched over the balustrade, elbows resting on the plantation-style porch outside a retail shop, I looked across the parking lot. At the siding of another low-key, plantation-revival shop, where I spied my favorite childhood lyrics .
Words perfectly suited to the dreams of an eighth-grade boy, or the denizens of a Hanalei hippie commune.
They’re supposedly the last words Jimi Hendrix ever wrote, never to be put to music. Composed on the eve of his death, to a woman.
Had it been completed, the song would’ve been called, “The Story of Life.”
A local had turned the lyrics into a visual art installation. Displaying them on the exterior wall of a boutique, he appended the final line of the previous verse, as a sort of revisionist title:
“I Am You Searching to Be Free.”
I am you searching to be free
— - —- - - - —-
the story- — -
of life is quicker
than the wink of an eye
—- - —- -
the story of love ——-
is hello and goodbye— — -
until we meet again
-Jimi Hendrix
When I first read these lines in my youth, inside a pulpy Hendrix biography from the last millennium, and imbibed the mythic circumstances of their composition—young liebestod: romantic!—I thought they constituted as fine a work of literature as had ever been conceived. (I was fourteen, but that shouldn’t diminish their beauty.)
The lyrics even managed to impress the artistic sensibilities of another fourteen-year- old. A fawn-faced beauty I was lucky enough to be ‘dating’ at the time (we never went on an actual date, and these days I only date myself, by using the word, “dating”).
Simple words but, like the songs of youth, they have a special place in my psyche. Emotional cue cards out of the past, deep cuts from the jukebox of the mind. Musical madeleines (the magical muffin that conjures the past in Proust).
So I decided to try the words out on my son, who’d just sidled up to me, to see how they struck him—my motives were slightly different this time, but the basic idea was the same: try to make a favorable impression on someone you care about, through a shared aesthetic experience.
He’s eight, but it’s never too early to start chicken-scratching your own sensibilities on your very own blank slate, if the slate is willing, or in this case, bored.
I chanted him “The Story of Life.”
His reaction seemed to like the effect of the words (“Hmmph…”), or more likely, the artwork itself, on the side of the building, which he was beginning to observe more carefully (“Ahh… Huh?”).
It was a mosaic of some sort, composed of individual, pin-like pieces of metal, constituting the whole. The script itself was strung together from these metallic fragments, the curvilinear shapes of the words and characters recreating Jimi Hendrix’s actual handwriting.
The ‘song’ looked like a constellation of metal shards, an aluminum archipelago of a thousand shiny atolls, glistening in the afternoon sun.
Next to the material words, a stylized bust of the mythical “Wild Man of Borneo” himself began to take shape, like a swarm of nickel bees coalescing into a cloud of portraiture.
The impression it gave was… like one of those afterthought birthday gifts from the 1980s.
A 3-D “Pin Art” contraption. Where you put your hand, a favorite symbol, or inevitably someone’s penis or middle finger under the pin board, quickly flip the whole apparatus over and onto the object whose image is to be captured, the pins sliding loosely into place around the object, and—if the object is carefully removed without disturbing too many of the pins, and the frame returned carefully upright—an image remains of the object, in relief, under the plexiglass on the front side of the frame (an imperfect impression on the other).
A mosaic of pins. Pin-i Pin-drix, is what it looked like, the Hendrix of my childhood toy. Though with more negative space, and fewer, larger, pins.
The scale was much more impressive than the pins-and-needles toy of yester-youth. The work hung some eight-by-eight feet, framed by a white canvas background, which stood out from the forest green, or navy blue (depending on the cloud-filtered sunlight) siding of the building.
When we moved (my son and I), the image moved, took on fuzzy distortions, changed shape, going in and out of focus, owing to the fact that, whatever the individual ‘pins’ actually were, they stood several inches perpendicular to the wall. Like a school of diminutive sun dials, or a stationary parade of slight sculptures, viewed from aside and above.
The parts were fixed, the sum fluid. Observer and subject, subject and object moved together. The image shifted, depending on the viewer’s angle of perception. Like the hidden anamorphic skull that leaps out of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, when the canvas is viewed from just the right angle.
It was a study in continuity and change, part and whole, perspective and reality, gestalt. Unexpected, in a village strip mall.
It was cool (the boy thought so too; I thought).
A few notes on Hanalei—before we get down to brass tacks, or… pins or whatever—and the north side of Kauai island in general.
As stated, the north is the proverbial (and any other day, the actual) rainy side of Kauai island.
Nearly every Hawaiian island, any habitable and touristed one anyway, has a dry side and a wet side, or sides, due to the unique microclimates of the archipelago, all of them created by the position of volcanic mountains in relation to the North Easterly trade winds.
This is common knowledge, even among the Tommy Bahama set, who in my experience, mostly prefer the warm and sunny sides of islands. For the same reason that elderly snowbirds prefer Arizona and Florida come (the) December (of their years).
Even the early Polynesians (and more analogous to Tommy Bahama, the early missionaries) chose to make their first homes on the arid coastline of Hawaii island (the “Big Island”).
On the dry southwest side, to eke out a frail existence on the serrated lava barrens of that island.
Most likely, this arid moonscape is simply where the ocean currents deposited the first Polynesians that drifted here from Oceania, and later, the first Puritans from Boston.
For various reasons, I prefer the rainy side of Hawaiian islands, especially Kauai.
Fewer tourists choose to stay in, say, Hilo (on the wet side of the Big Island), for one thing. Yet that is where one can find green outside of a golf course, on big Hawaii.
I recall driving hours, from the sole-lacerating barrens of the west coast, then over the cool, pastured highlands of Hawaii island where the paniolo cowboys roam, to finally catch a glimpse of tropical rain forest approaching anything like the wet verdure of Kauai island.
In general, Kauai, even the dry side, is relatively lush compared to most of the other islands. Especially Hawaii Island, since much of the volcanically-active Big Island is still infant rock.
There, fresh land is being born.
Land is born! Where else can Americans choke on the Roy Rogers dictum: “Buy land, son, ‘cause God ain’t makin’ any more of it”?
In Hawaii, God still is.
A century before Captain Cook, an English metaphysical poet named John Donne declared that, “no man is an island,” entire unto itself.
A Hawaiian proverb once personified the wives of King Kamehameha as islands, in relation to the king (presumably, also an island).
The two sayings aren’t entirely contradictory.
In Hawaii, if one can be an island, the older one is, the more fertile. The younger, the less. It takes time to break ground and grow roots.
Less figuratively, and more geologically, tree roots are what actually break-up the ground here; the only thing persistent enough to fissure unrelenting, newborn volcanic rock.
It takes geological time to grind the crustal earth into ground.
Paradoxically, Hawaii feels ancient because it is some of the youngest earth on the crust of the planet.
It is easier for the mind to slip into the past when your surroundings mirror the paleozoic era (wet side), or the Holy Land (dry side), to feel old when everything around you looks as it did when the earth was young.
The indigenous Hawaiians under the first European gaze here, still technically living in the Stone Age (using stone tools), likewise seemed ancient to the Europeans, precisely because the locals were in the infancy of technological ‘progress.’
Until half a millennium into the common era (c. 500 a.d.), there were no human beings inhabiting the islands at all. It calls into question what it means to be indigenous in a land where everything, from the first taro seed to the last Californian, floated here from outside, in the last fifteen hundred years.
That is a slippery conceptual slope, however, in 2021.
Anyway, the mere mention of “wet side” keeps much of the unlocalized Hawaiian-shirt crowd at bay on most islands.
Many tourists do come to the rainy north shore of Kauai, to be sure.
But nearly as many leave Hanalei gently complaining about the intermittent spells of raindrops that occasionally lick the salt from your skin, like an upturned bucket of so many cool, freshwater fellatios, or the soft lappings of some benevolent epidermal cunnilinguist—as if these raindrops were a sort of beautiful but predatory nuisance.
In other words, I find the rain in Hanalei, and oral sex in general, pleasant.
It makes some people uncomfortable.
The precipitation on the valley floor of Hanalei is mostly—summer and early fall—gently refreshing, a welcome relief from the sun.
It makes for what Robert Nesta Marley (who, like Hawaii, had Englishmen in his blood) once called, “rainbow country.”
This is where rainbows were born, in fact, according to a bit of Hawaiian mythology much kinder than diluvian Genesis.
The whole valley is one big rain chalice; Hanalei is rain. You can fathom it, on the hidden plateau up there, collecting in the cool cups of the hills, brimming like a half-mile champagne tower before it overflows into the pools and cataracts.
Waterfalls here aren’t so much falling rivers as falling rain, rain momentarily deferred, rain after the fact. Even during a dry spell, you are looking at rain up there in the cataracts, folks: the ghosts of rain, cloud serpents. They run cold, but the precipitation that reaches you below is perfect.
If you want to sip dark Koloa rum while peeping the immaculate conception of waterfalls and rainbows during a punctual afternoon cloudburst, from the veranda of your rental house sans air conditioning, go to north-side Hanalei.
If you want to be terrorized by a red-necked, tank-topped gorilla, the motorist swerving in-and-out of oncoming traffic in-between pulls from his plastic flask of Bacardi light, cutting you off on your way to cryogenically freeze yourself inside a hotel room until the anxiety meds take hold, stay in south-side Poipu.
I’m exaggerating, of course. (I don’t have anxiety disorder.)
However the dry south side of Kauai, filled with prodigal mainland exiles, does have a local reputation approaching that of certain parts of Appalachia, or the hinterlands overseen by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
But what do I know? This is all regional gossip, secondhand hearsay from a half-Filipino, half-Hawaiian river-tubing guide.
He says the south is full of kooks.
I’m staying on the south side, in Poipu, this time around. We came to Hawaii for our first Corona sabbatical, along with representatives from the younger and the older generations, so it made sense to go somewhere with plentiful sunshine and a killer pool, the closest thing to Disney World on mostly-laidback Kauai: the Grand Hyatt Resort and Spa.
The closest thing to actual Disney World in the Hawaiian islands is, of course, the Alauni Disney Resort on Oahu, which my former in-laws once lovingly dragged me to, footing the bill.
After that experience, I refuse to (consciously, willingly) participate in the rampant Disnification of Hawaii. The Lilo and Stitch, Moana scene on Oahu is awful, truly insipid. But that deserves its own book, and would require anxiety meds.
The pools, upper and lower (“adult” and “all ages”), the chlorinated “lazy river” overhung with red pepper trees, the waterslides, and the artificial saltwater lagoon at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort and Spa are undeniably cool to my eight-year-old son and twelve-year-old niece, and to their septuagenarian grandparents, who rise at dawn with all the other jet-lagged castaways, to secure a bevy of lounge chairs with enough towels and parasols to shelter us from the hot sun which lured us here in the first place.
This early-bird ritual is de rigueur for anyone who wants to relax poolside without sitting wet-assed on the hot deck, or rolling in the fresh-cut grass of numerous perfectly-manicured lawns, to which a small army of landscapers emerge every morning, just minutes before the seat-savers around dawn, to meticulously sculpt with weed whackers and scissors (seriously).
The scarcity of poolside real estate for all of the guests, and the unscrupulous seat-saving practices of a few, have already sparked at least one turf war, between my ex-wife’s father and another patriarch, who land-grabbed several of my father-in-law’s seats and staked his claim to them with the latest paperback installment of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing series.
A literary cycle which includes doorstop histories such as Killing Lincoln and Killing Hitler, and other regicide-themed chronicles of fustian —Killing Time, Killing Braincells, Kill Me, Bill, and so forth.
Bill O’Reilly stole our seats. These are the natural rhythms and daytime dramas of the Tommy Bahama set.
The soft violence of the swimming pool was sometimes displaced by more visceral threats, like the soused brute who nearly man-slaughtered several motorists, not to mention local pedestrians, including a lifeguard cross-training on the highway shoulder, as we returned from Hanalei to Poipu, the afternoon of the “Hendrix mosaic” viewing.
The whole south-side, Hyatt-Sheraton scene felt like a landlocked version of a luxury cruise—where an imperceptibly large number of disturbing events take place beyond the awareness of most guests, I can assure you.
I’ve never set sail on one of those floating, city-sized Carnival affairs, but the two cruise voyages I have embarked upon were big enough to host a broad spectrum of casual human depravity.
In my limited experience, in the course of a single Mediterranean odyssey, I managed to witness: domestic violence secondhand, sounding through the bulkheads of the cabin next door, which the crew seemed to find mildly-but-amusingly inconvenient, warranting a wink from one sailor when I poked my head out the cabin door to investigate, and; awaking one day to several security guards milling around a tarp-covered body, defenestrated from a hotel window across the landing sometime during the wee hours of the morning, the day after we made landfall in Istanbul.
That was only one cruise, but crew members on both voyages assured me that a surprising number of suicides occur at sea each season. This was years before COVID-19 turned many cruise ships into festering prisons and flotsam lazarettos for the better part of a year.
The Hyatt wasn’t quite Istanbul, or a Carnival cruise, but I did observe a shadow-play romance late one evening, performed by two silhouetted figures below my hotel balcony, one of whom had a hulking profile that matched the contours of the drunken ape terrorizing the highway earlier that afternoon.
Enjoying a soothing glass (plastic room service cup) of ice and dark cane spirits, watching the moon rise from the lanai, I heard an ominous rattle, and looked down to see a sleeveless inebriate briefly taking his frustrations out on the ADA-accessible sidewalk railing, before the figure regained what was left of its composure, and staggered off ahead of who-or-whatever it was angry with.
Trailing behind him, at a safe distance of about fifty yards, a cowed head and sunken shoulders materialized.
A wisp of ethereal silhouette, traumatized into silence, who dutifully followed her man-shadow in train, like an abused royal attendant, floating back and forth, up and down the meandering pathway with imperceptible footsteps, until both phantoms disappeared into one of several backlit, open air corridors, faceless.
A ghost of a woman. A beast of a man. That’s how it struck me from my evening perch above the dark pools and hotel gardens, anyway.
That’s the south-north, dry-wet island dichotomy, from my perspective, which is anything but exhaustive.
I’m just an interloper, a leaper-into.
Southside Poipu has its charms. Like beaching sea turtles, and lecturing locals.
Or when you leave Poipu, to visit the shady stream-side village of Old Koloa, nestled in the beautiful absurdity of hanging banyan roots, just up the inland road.
Or alternately, when you creep along the coastal highway towards Spouting Horn blowhole, past the botanical gardens and river-fed secret beach, onward to what Mark Twain called the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” Waimea Canyon.
The dry side of Kauai also boasts the spiritual vortex where Wailua River empties into Wailua Bay. Here missionary congregations still seek God alongside New Age hippies, near the hotel where Elvis filmed Blue Hawaii (the Coco Palms Resort was devastated by a hurricane in 1992, but its skeleton remains a landmark).
The south side of Kauai is nothing to sneeze at. And northern Hanalei has its hangups too, I’m sure, aside from road blocks, mudslides, flooding and mosquitos.
But now, at least you have some glimpse into the author’s personal mythology of Hanalei and the north:
Beautiful, lush, taro fields, remote forests peopled with hippie communalists trying to live off the land; adolescent memories of a topless girl innocently trekking through the muds of Kalalau Trail on her way to the precipitous Na Pali coastline, which begins at the dead end of the road past Hanalei.
A sight more beautiful than even Hanalei Bay—the Na Pali coast.
I encountered the shirtless woman hiking the trails with my father and brother on our first visit to the island, around the time I was romanticizing Jimi Hendrix biographies.
An elder hiker, who encountered her bare torso about the same moment I did, to his obvious discomfort, harbored a more missionary attitude. He moaned a painful, puritan:
“Oh geeez.”
Or maybe he was just lonely.
This is my Hanalei. It took me thirty-five years, but eventually I learned to surf here, and pushed my son into his first wave, not far in time or space from mine.
This Hanalei exists only in the mind. Sometimes I bring the mind to the actual place, have a look around, and the two can get some work done. But it is always a leap of imagination to dwell in paradise.
It is something in excess, a myth. A luxury.
When I go somewhere, I like to read up on it. Travel guides are fine, travelogues and memoirs are better, but best of all, perhaps, is something by that rare author of fiction whose sensibilities you think you can trust, or at least accept a few good-faith mistakes from, in their own historical context.
Jack London’s not perfect, but I once succumbed to his post-romantic Stories of Hawaii, on a trip to the Big Island and Kauai just after my son was born.
I enjoyed London’s Stories at the time, and might—cautiously—recommend this as an entry point for casual readers, a vessel containing all of the genres above, a beginner’s cup for imbibing local myths and regional histories, the hulas and meles (from London’s perspective, mind you).
I say, cautiously, in part because some of London’s prose in Stories of Hawaii is banal if not patently ridiculous. But primarily because London was a young, naive adventurer, en route to cover the Russo-Japanese War, when he gathered much of the material for these tales—someone susceptible to the exoticism and Social Darwinism of his time.
London, in his short but prolific career (before he died at 40), was forever racially conflicted in his representation of ‘other’ cultures. His key maternal influence was a former slave, Virginia Prentiss, who nursed and intermittently raised him in San Francisco when his parents, an astrologer and a spiritualist, proved unreliable.
Experiencing a turbulent adolescence, London briefly fled his unstable home life for the Klondike, then became an oyster pirate around the Bay Area, and a staunch supporter of the downtrodden (including, much of the time, colonized peoples, albeit ambivalently).
He believed in worker’s rights, unionization, socialism, and—like the founder of Stanford University and many others—eugenics.
London’s portrayal of Hawaiians is empathetic, but can’t help ventriloquizing the local population through a mainland American consciousness, about ten years after Hawaiian sovereignty had been usurped by American political and business interests.
Nonetheless, with eyes wide open, Stories of Hawaii is a document of colonial perspective a decade after America’s forced annexation of the territory, as London witnessed it circa 1904-1907. Among the most famous Stories of Hawaii, important from a historical perspective, though one of the least literary, is the tale of “Koolau the Leper.”
The island of Molokai is infamous for its Hawaiian leper colony, Kalawao. Native sufferers of the disease were permanently quarantined here, from the colony’s establishment in 1866 by King Kamehmeha V, until its closure by the Hawaiian-American government a century later, in 1969.
“Koolau the Leper” tells the tale of Kaluaiko’olau, the colonial-resistance hero who refused permanent relocation to Molokai, fleeing with his wife and son to the remote Kalalau Valley instead.
Kalalau Valley is nestled on the precipitous Na Pali coastline of north Kauai island, whence the name of the aforementioned Kalalau Trail (where I hiked with my father and brother as a fourteen-year-old).
Kalalau Valley is where “Koolau the Leper” made his stand, and quite literally ‘shot the sheriff,' a man named Louis H. Stolz, who came to round up the small band of afflicted Kauaians, along with their uninfected family members, under the auspices of quarantine enforcement.
The reclusive Kalalau valley-dwellers had previously been content to remain there in self-isolation, under an implicit understanding with the Hawaiian Monarchy.
Until a new Provisional Government, established after the American planters' coup in 1893, intended to banish the self-reliant colony from their home island, Kauai, to the leper colony on Molokai.
Jack London, who likely heard this history from Sheriff Stolz’s son, casts “Koolau the Leper” as a figure of American self-reliance and rugged individualism, while the narrative of the real-life Kaluaiko’olau, as told by his wife Pi’ilani, evinces a reverence for family and place as “Koolau’s” chief motivations.
Pi’ilani’s narrative, as told to John G.M. Sheldon, was published as “The True Story of Kaluaiko’olau,” in 1906, years before London’s “Koolau the Leper” was published.
However an English translation wasn’t undertaken until 1987, so for eighty years London’s popular version was the most widely read, while the one by Kaluaiko’s wife languished in obscurity.
The Kalalau trailhead, which leads to the former leper valley hideout of Kaluaiko, is not far from the site of Taylor Camp…
A notorious hippie commune established on land owned by Howard Taylor—the brother of movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
Taylor Camp was established the same year the Molokai leper colony was finally shuttered, in 1969.
Howard Taylor bailed thirteen counterculture types, fleeing social turmoil on the mainland, out of jail for vagrancy, and somewhat cynically invited them to settle on his beachfront property, as a snub against local government officials, who refused to grant Taylor building permits and wished to have his land condemned.
This is what indigenous-imperial land disputes looked like, roughly a century after American annexation—hippies and Hollywood types squabbling with local island officials, and the native Hawaiian toughs who helped intimidate and evict the longhaired squatters.
One of the few things hippies and local toughs outside of law enforcement could agree on was “Pakalōlō,” loosely translated as “wacko tobacco”—cannabis.
While there were many altercations between unwanted haole hippies and native Kauaians, a few nonviolent encounters took place, under the influence of Hawaiian landrace strains, and those the Taylor communists smuggled with them from the mainland.
Years after the treehouse village at Taylor Camp was officially condemned in 1973, long after legal battles and loiterers were finally dispersed in 1977, and the remaining structures were burned to the ground; after the land became an undeveloped state park, clandestine cannabis cultivation remained a staple of north Kauai counterculture.
Not unlike northern California.
The remote and inaccessible corners of Kalauau, and other valleys like it, became perfect illicit cultivation sites. The Taylor Camp ethos migrated from its previous location further into the recesses of the Na Pali coast.
As late as 2018, north shore Kauai was still dealing with the hippie headache, now further off the beaten path.
Which ends with the Kuhio Highway at Kē’ē Beach, where the muddy Kalalau Trail begins.
The half-naked hiker I encountered there years ago was one of many Edenic rucksack wanderers, come to escape modernity and live out a primitivist fantasy in the feral gardens of Na Pali’s coastal valleys, where introduced species like mango, guava, and avocado grow naturally, and wild boar and goat are plentiful.
The problem is, some of these invasive species, the human ones, are prone to abusing ancient Hawaiian heritage, taking stones from archeological sites to dam streams, defecating in them, and generally trashing the place.
As with Taylor Camp in the 1970s, some of these millennial counterculture refugees on the Kalalau Trail bring a hard drug scene with them into the forest.
After a local woman was killed by a methamphetaminated fugitive from the squatter’s camps of Kalalau, and pictures surfaced of bare-chested white women, wearing hula skirts, frolicking atop a sacred temple site—the locals had enough, and the county cracked down on illegal camping off the trail.
But the trail is precarious, and the hideaways numerous; complete eviction is next to impossible.
The words of one Kalalau squatter are revealing. “Barca,” a post-traumatic veteran of America’s war in Iraq (just as many of his forebears were veterans or draft dodgers of the war in Vietnam)—someone who eluded authorities during the 2018 crackdown sweep—describes the Na Pali coast as a therapeutic refuge from American society, taxes, his tiny apartment, and a rudderless life.
An escape, into what he calls, “the Disney forest.”
Even among the counterculture, in the secluded forests of Eden, free from venomous reptiles and apex predators, haole Hawaii is considered “Disneyland.”
In many ways, Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper” was the first popular work of fiction to depict Kalalau Valley as the perfect rebel hideaway, now accessible just up the road from the Hanalei Hendrix mural in old town Hanalei—after a long, precarious hike.
Literary fiction and Jack London aside, I like anthropology, and what the Hawaiians call “talk-story”: oral and musical story-telling. The two always converge at some point.
I’m also a sucker for music history and ethnography.
After this trip, I delved into the story of musician Joseph Kekuku and the Hawaiian steel guitar, and cracked some histories by Susanna Moore, of course, the haole local, hip to myth and storytelling, who was seventeen when she experienced 1960’s Honolulu, and has written numerous accounts of Hawaii, fictional and non, ever since.
Reading Hawaiian song and history, it finally occurs to me, three weeks and two-and-a-half thousand miles later, that the last line of Jimi Hendrix’s love-and-death poem, “The Story of Life,” pinned-up on that mosaic right there in old Hanalei for all to see, glaring as sunlight—Until we meet again—are the same last words, some of the only ones rendered in English, to another song.
The most famous Hawaiian song ever composed, by the last Hawaiian monarch to rule her own people, shortly before she was ousted in a coup by American businessmen in 1893.
“Until we meet again” is the final refrain of Hawaii’s national anthem. “Aloha ‘Oe,” composed by the fabled, sad-eyed Last Princess of Hawaii, Lilo‘uokalani.
“Aloha ‘Oe” (“Farewell to Thee”) is a love song.
Given the mournful chapter of history Lili‘uokalani was eventually written into, it also became a swan song.
History turned it into a hymn of mourning, a requiem for the queen’s monarchy, and the death of her beloved, formerly-sovereign kingdom.
At the time of composition (1878), it was just a simple torch song, dreamt up on horseback, as Princess Lili‘uokalani returned to Honolulu from a visit to Maunawili, the famous Boyd-owned ranch on the windward side of Oahu.
According to a story told by her contemporaries, the princess witnessed an especially fond farewell embrace, between one of the princess’s English traveling companions, Col. James Boyd, and a beautiful young Maunawili woman.
After admiring the bay below them, as the equestrians turned around to begin their mountainous descent to Honolulu, the princess stole a final glance at the bay, before witnessing the intercultural love embrace between Col. James Boyd and his “sweet rose of Maunawili,” which supposedly inspired the lyrics to “Aloha ‘Oe.”
By the time the riders reached Honolulu, descending through the lyrical, swirling mists and rainswept pali cliffs in the song … Lili‘uokalani had finished composing this famous ode to love, loss, and place, now synonymous with Hawaii itself (translated into English below):
Farewell to you, farewell to you
The charming one who dwells in the shaded bowers
One fond embrace,
‘Ere I depart
Until we meet again
Sweet memories come back to me
Bringing fresh remembrances of the past
Dearest one, yes, you are mine own
From you, true love shall never depart
I have seen and watched your loveliness
The sweet rose of Maunawili
And ’tis there the birds of love dwell
And sip the honey from your lips
Aloha ‘oe, Aloha ‘oe […]
Until we meet again
In truth, much of the sonic material of “Aloha ‘Oe” (1878) already existed before Lili‘uokalani hummed the original lyrics to her song on horseback.
The melody of the verse echoes “The Rock Beside the Sea,” composed and published by Charles Crozat Converse in Philadelphia (1857).
The chorus strongly resembles the tune of George Frederick Root’s (1854) composition, “There’s Music in the Air.”
While one critic from the Honolulu Chronicle unjustly and posthumously criticized the princess for being, at best, a musical magpie, at worst a thief… by now it should be clear that most song, story and art have their being in borrowing. In generative theft, misuse, and bricolage.
“There’s Music in the Air,” in the words of the tune that inspired the melodic refrain of “Aloha ‘Oe.”
And music in the air is music for the taking.
So a famous princess borrowed a few obscure Romantic melodies, just as an obscure Hanalei muralist borrowed a few pieces from a farewell poem penned by a celebrated countercultural icon, Jimi Hendrix, and Princess Lili‘uokalani.
The “Until we meet again” shared between “Aloha ‘Oe” and “The Story of Life” projects Hendrix’s midcentury “I am you searching to be free” back onto Lili’uokalani's fin de siécle Hawaii.
The queen who sang “Until we meet again” nearly a century before Hendrix, also searched to be free a century before him.
A 3-D muralist from Hanalei had to pilfer those unspoken words from the future to feed the past, to make that point, on the side of a boutique strip mall.
Art changes with context and perspective—even if a song’s meaning is not willfully manipulated by another artist, or juxtaposed with another work of art, like the juxtaposition of the Hanalei Hendrix with “Aloha Oe.” Even before the haole coup of 1893 repositioned “Aloha ‘Oe” as a national lament, the song had overtones suggesting it was more than a simple love song about an amorous aristocrat pining for his “rose of Maunawili.”
For one thing, the remaining Hawaiian royal ali’i, women with names like Princess Lili‘uokalani, Princess Likelike, and Keawepo’o’ole, were betrothed to Anglo-American businessmen with names like John Owen Dominis and Archibald Scott Cleghorn. For every “rose of Maunawili,” a Col. James Boyd.
By most accounts, Princess Lili’uokalani’s marriage to John Owen Dominis was a loveless and politically-calculated affair, promising to insinuate her husband into the royal line. For her to write a love song, in the voice of one of these male potentates, suggests that Lili‘uokalani was imagining not only the loving, interracial courtship she never enjoyed, but also the real sovereign power she soon found herself lacking as a figurehead Queen, finally deposed by men like her husband.
Physically resembling the “rose of Maunawili,” psychologically resembling the haole lover and narrator of “Aloha ‘Oe," the princess becomes the female subject of her own male desire in song. That subject, the “rose of Maunawili,” fragrant with “remembrances of the past,” suggests the future queen was already courting Hawaii’s sovereign past in song. In other words, if only subconsciously, 15 years before the coup and annexation, it’s possible that Lili‘uokalani poured both her romantic and political anxieties into “Aloha ‘Oe,” anticipating the future meanings the song would acquire when those premonitions came to pass.
Art changes with context and perspective, art anticipates changes in context and perspective, and sometimes art actually changes context and perspective.
Perhaps it’s overreach to compare Lili‘uokalani’s subconscious colonial anxiety in “Aloha ‘Oe” to what Percy Shelley said “In Defense of Poetry”—that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—if we’re speaking of political legislation and state law. But poets do legislate taste, formulate context and perspective.
Over time, political philosophy, popular taste and ideology can be more powerful than political muscle. It would take a century, but today Lili‘uokalani is regarded as a romantic figure in part of the Hawaiian-American psyche, a sacrificial emblem of nonviolent resistance to colonial folly, and it is her perspective, or what we imagine it to be, that many tourists visiting Hawaii unconsciously perform.
I found myself succumbing to fashionable white guilt on our plantation inner-tube float, beseeching our guide, with rhetorical indignation: What good could have possibly come from the exploitative plantation system that ultimately made Hawaii’s annexation inevitable?
His reply was sobering: “It brought Filipinos here, like me.” His grandfather came from the Philippines to work the cane; now the grandson guides tours of the shuttered plantation, floating holes down its spacious irrigation canals dug by Chinese laborers.
In between grandfather and grandson, the Lihue sugar plantation became an eighteen-hole golf course. Now the land is owned by Steve Case, the former chair of AOL Time Warner, Kauai’s second-largest landowner. Mark Zuckerberg has colonized 1400 acres on the northeast side of the island, where he raises cattle on macadamia nuts and beer.
Remember. Always remember. That is one function of the old oli chants and mele songs—sacred rituals of memory. There is a comprehensive oli genre entirely devoted to reciting the genealogy of kings, as one venerable example. There are many other chants and songs that remind Hawaii of her past, mundane as well as sacred. Drinking songs, temperance songs. Piano songs. Mirror songs. Don’t-beat-your-dog-songs. The memory of Hawaii’s oldest hero, the mythical Polynesian navigator who brought human life to the islands, Hawai‘iloa, was preserved for over a millennium, through oral tradition alone.
Princess Lili‘uokalani is part of that tradition. Though widely remembered for “Aloha ‘Oe,” the queen was a prolific composer of many other kinds of song, some of them written in palatial captivity. Certainly, her most famous song is a potent evocation bringing, as the lyrics suggest, “fresh remembrances of the past,” and the changes which brought that past to an end.
But the past is never really at an end, especially in young-old Hawaii. It emerges in the present daily, like magma unto lava, bubbling through the bedrock.
Queen Lili’uokalani was a Hawaiian hero with a literary imagination and poetic prowess. She used these gifts to fashion herself into an American legend while simultaneously preserving her heritage. She echoes another American literary imagination, Herman Melville’s, when she described Hawaii as the “Vineyard of Naboth”—the perfect plantation, defiled by the tyrant Ahab, in the book of Kings.
Herman Melville passed through the seas around Hawaii, en route to Polynesia, where he jumped ship to live with the cannibals of Typee and Omoo, half a century before Lili‘uokalani wrote her own words about American mania. Like the “Great American Novelist” of Moby Dick, the queen conceived of America as a self-destructive king, or captain, Ahab.
During “Aloha ‘Oe’s” evolution from love song to state anthem, between composition and coup, 1878 and 1893, another musical Hawaiian created something that would disseminate Hawaiian cultural memory across the globe.
In fact, Hawaii’s most characteristic song, her “national anthem,” “Aloha ‘Oe” would be unrecognizable to modern ears without the instrument that now ubiquitously accompanies its melody—the Hawaiian slide guitar.
American music in general, Americana itself, folk-blues-and-country, would be unrecognizable without Joseph Kekuku.
Jospeh Kekuku’s Iron Nail
In the small seaside town of Laie, on Oahu island, on the same windward coast that Princess Lili’uokalani gazed down upon before she wrote “Aloha ‘Oe,” there is a modest, flower-laden statue of the man who invented the Hawaiian steel guitar.
Jospeh Kekuku, as his name suggests, was the son of devout Mormon parents, from a community of native Hawaiian converts living among Latter Day Saints missionaries, who fled mainland religious persecution. As theological refugees themselves, the Mormons in Laie were less adamant about imposing their beliefs on the native population, compared to the protestant Bostonians who preceded them elsewhere. Here at least, in Laie on Oahu, traditional Hawaiian music was allowed to flourish.
When Joseph was in his teens, his parents made a pilgrimage to Mormon Mecca in Utah, and Joseph stayed behind on Oahu.
While his parents were abroad in latter-day Zion, Joseph was attending boarding school at the Kamehameha School for Boys, a school for ‘good little Hawaiian boys,’ endowed by yet another Hawaiian princess, married to yet another wealthy American businessman—the Bishops. (Today, one can visit Lili‘uokalani’s handwritten lyrics for “Aloha ‘Oe” at the eponymous Bishop Museum, in Honolulu.)
And so the most popular version of the legend goes…
Walking along the railroad tracks one day, young Joseph picked up an iron railroad spike, rolled it around in his palm, and slid it into his back pocket. Back at the school dormitory, playing his guitar, Joseph remembered the railroad spike, pulled it out, and ran it over the strings. It got good to him.
He liked the sound so much he revamped his guitar, raised the bridge, put steel strings on it, and started a musical trend at the Kamehameha School for Boys: slide guitar.
Shortly thereafter, Joseph filed the railroad spike into a more refined implement to slide over his strings, in the school’s machine shop. The new guitar form quickly gained popularity on Oahu, spawned imitators, and spread throughout Hawaii like the Clap, eventually reaching mainland America.
Kekuku’s railroad-spike epiphany occurred around 1889, four years before annexation. “Aloha ‘Oe” had been written, but the lyrics “Farewell to Thee” had not yet acquired their new, political meaning. The song would soon acquire its characteristic, slur-note guitar accompaniment, thanks to Joseph Kekuku’s innovation.
After the coup, Lili‘uokalani’s ouster, and U.S. annexation, the Provisional Government of the American planter class outlawed such hallmarks of Hawaiian culture as hula dancing, surfing, and the Hawaiian language itself—all the staples of mainland-to-Hawaii tourism today.
Seeing what happened to indigenous Americans on the mainland, fearing for the loss of their own cultural identity, anxious about the prospect of forced relocation to reservations, many native Hawaiians—particularly singers, dancers and musicians, whose livelihoods had recently been outlawed—fled Hawaii, taking their culture on the road: to, ironically, the mainland United States.
In 1904, Joseph Kekuku left Hawaii to tour the West Coast of America.
The recent annexation of Hawaii, coupled with a wildly successful Broadway play set in the islands, Bird of Paradise (nine years running), along with the popular “Hawaii Pavillion” at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, ignited a craze for Hawaiian music and culture on the mainland, and internationally, at the very moment Hawaiian culture was being banned back home.
It is in this context, cultural and political annexation, that the Hawaiian steel guitar clandestinely entered American roots music.
Considering members of the Hawaiian royal family touring the U.S. at this time were once ejected from a train car for being “Negroes,” it’s not surprising that when Hawaiian entertainers and musicians came to tour the American South, they were relegated to boarding houses, along with Afro-American entertainers, and a mosaic of performers from 'Other’ cultures.
“This included mariachis, Chinese acrobats, and all of these other performers hanging out, playing music, and having really good times together. They were kind of making the most from those conditions and learning from each other,”
…according to the somewhat rosy assessment of music historian, and curator of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, John Troutman.
According to Troutman, this is the path Joseph Kekuku’s Hawaiian steel guitar took on its way to becoming both the blues slide guitar, and the country & western pedal steel guitar, each staples of their respective genres.
It’s no accident that the history of the slide guitar is racially bifurcated in this manner. American music, especially in its most repressed yet fertile breeding ground, the South, has always been segregated into black and white. The record industry used evolving euphemisms for this distinction over the years: “Race Records” and “Hillbilly” in the 1920s-1940s; “Rhythm & Blues” and “Country & Western” were corresponding terms famously introduced by Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler in the 1950s; in the 1970s the Billboard Top 40 charts began to use the terms “R&B” and “Pop.” Today, the ideological argument between “rockism” and “poptimism” in music criticism, with the former associated with white critics and the latter with multiculturalism, perpetuates this racial dichotomy.
But, as Troutman notes, this quintessentially dualistic American mentality obscures the extent to which American music—especially in the South—was a multicultural affair.
The music scholar Ted Gioia has argued persuasively that musical innovation comes from the outside in, and the bottom up. Once subversive innovations go mainstream, the status quo tends to take credit for those innovations, obscuring their origins. Likely, this happened with the Hawaiian steel guitar, which was soon metonymous with all-American country music, after the Hawaiian steel morphed into the “pedal steel” guitar.
The “Father of Country Music,” the “man who started it all,” Jimmie Rodgers, employed more than a dozen Hawaiian steel guitar players on his records (all uncredited by the record label), and even wrote a song, “Everybody Does it in Hawaii” (pronounced “Huh-why-yuh”).
Conversely, a rose by any other name, a Hawaiian steel guitar referred to as “bottleneck” or “slide guitar” designates a quintessential blues instrument, which white folklorists and blues historians in the 1960s were eager to connect to West African traditions—West Africa being the ultimate source for the Faustian bargains and mythical “Crossroads” tropes of 1920s blues mythology (selling one’s soul at the crossroads in exchange for musical ability).
These tropes and legends were adapted to the white rock-and-roll mystique of the 1960s (in no small part by these very folklorists). Thus, many blues historians still argue that the “diddley bo” (“Hey, Bo Diddley!”), a single-string slide instrument, is the true origin of the blues slide guitar.
Perhaps the blues slide guitar is both, Hawaiian and African-inspired. The diddley bo, thought to derive from West Africa, was a homespun Southern instrument, mostly used by beginners and children, as an introductory stepping-stone to six-string guitar. Perhaps rural Southern bluesmen in the early-twentieth century, weened on a simple child’s instrument that used a slide, were receptive to a Hawaiian style that also employed a slide.
What is clear is that many midcentury blues historians seemed to downplay the possibilities of Hawaiian origin in favor of African mystique. Troutman, at the Smithsonian, on the other hand, points to interviews recorded with Son House in the 1960s, in which ethnomusicologists, preoccupied with the origins of slide guitar, kept asking House where he learned to “play like that.” On record, the patriarch of blues slide guitar finally cops to his inspiration:
“Oh, you mean the Hawaiian way of playing?”
Other blues legends like Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson (of aforementioned “crossroads” fame, rumored to have sold his soul at such an intersection in exchange for his inimitable guitar style), were also known to play slide with their guitars slung across their laps in the Hawaiian style, to finger pick in the Hawaiian style, and use the open or “slack key” tunings of the Hawaiian style.
The case of slide guitar’s introduction to country music, as Jimmie Rodgers’ recordings attest, is less contested. Nevertheless, Hawaii’s influence on country music is seldom acknowledged. There are no Hawaiians in the Country Music Hall of Fame, even though paniolo cowboy culture is an integral part of upland Hawaii, even though country music’s soothing, pastoral sound is much more reminiscent of the sleepy Hawaiian guitar, compared to its sometimes haunting, sometimes trenchant blues counterpart.
Blues, country, or in between, the earliest electric guitar manufacturers in the U.S. acknowledged a debt to Hawaiian steel. The first commercially available solid-body electric guitar, dubbed the “frying pan” because it was a flat piece of metal, held sideways across the knees, was a lap steel created by the California-based Rickenbacker Company.
Rickenbacker would go on to become the Beatles’ guitar of choice.
Another California company was founded by “postwar Promethean tinkerer” Leo Fender (in the words of James Miller’s Rise of Rock and Roll), an innovator who “always loved the sound of Hawaiian steel guitars and spent much of his time during Fender’s early years perfecting these instruments,” according to Fender: the golden age 1946-1970. Fender produced only steel guitars and amplifiers during the company’s early years.
Fender would go on to manufacture the guitar of choice for Jimi Hendrix.
Fender soon produced the “table steel” guitar, a lap steel on legs, finally adding foot pedals to the table steel, which could raise or lower the pitch of the strings, and the “pedal steel” guitar was born, which countless modern country pickers now sit behind.
Interestingly, the man who did more than anyone to introduce the Hawaiian guitar to country music (aside from Joseph Kekuku himself), the musical magpie Jimmie Rodgers, known for combining eclectic musical influences into his own unique style of bricolage, was introduced to diverse sounds, including Afro-American blues, while working on the railroad—that multicultural iron magnet, exploiting workers of all ethnicities indiscriminately.
It’s possible that “the singing brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers, was exposed to slide guitar in both its original Hawaiian, and its secondhand blues derivation, on the railroad tracks—the same place Joseph Kekuku picked up his inspiration for the slide guitar, in the form of an iron railroad spike, according to island lore.
The railroad spike is merely the most popular iteration of Joseph Kekuku’s steel guitar origin story; there are other versions of the myth that have him inspired by a metal comb, or sundry other items.
Why is the iron spike the archetypal version?
Well, that is an open question (open to criticism, mostly); some might say an irresponsible one, given the conjectural direction I’m headed with it. But I’d like to hazard the suggestion that, since myth is an exercise in associative thinking—pinning as many associations onto an overdetermined, archetypal symbol as it will accommodate—and since we are decoding myths and murals: perhaps there is some Hawaiian-American historical memory embedded in the image of an iron railroad spike.
Susanna Moore, the novelist and Hawaiian mythographer, identifies “scissors, beads, iron and mirrors” as the first items traded between Hawaiians and Englishmen. Of these, the iron nail is by far the most important item, symbolically as well as practically. When the Hawaiians traded with Europeans for the first time in history, near the mouth of the Waimea River in Kauai, James Cook found they “valued nails, iron above every other thing.” He was able to ration his ships by trading small pigs for “a sixpeny nail or two apiece.”
When Cook landed a second time, on Hawaii island, as Hawaiian men came to the ships offering women in exchange for “scissors, beads, iron and mirrors,” the British “worried that so many nails would be extracted from the ships, both by the sailors to give to the women, and by Hawaiian men that used their new gifts of adzes to pry loose the nails, that the ships would soon be pulled apart.”
The Hawaiians broke centuries-old taboos (kapu, whence the word “taboo”), in order to obtain iron implements from the sailors. Hawaiian royal ali’i allowed, even encouraged, their wives to paddle or swim out to Cook’s ships for an evening exchange of “fresh rations and kind females,” traded for scissors, beads, iron and mirrors. In the presence of Cook’s sailors, many Hawaiian women tasted foods, such as the Hawaiian pork they were trading, and certain kinds of fish, forbidden to them under kapu. They ate these foods in the presence of men, another taboo. In the morning, they swam back to shore with bartered goods, where their husbands pragmatically overlooked these sacred violations in return for the paraphernalia of British mercantilism.
Cook tried to enforce his own taboo on sexual intercourse, being (apparently, supposedly) genuinely concerned about infecting the local population with the “venereal complaints on board both the ships.”
By some accounts, Cook himself was chaste, moderate with alcohol and women; by others, he spent his “first night in Waimea with a pagan princess,” violating his own taboo, with the daughter of a high chiefess.
As the 19th century indigenous Hawaiian scholar and historian, David Malo put it:
“Lono [Cook, as the Hawaiian ‘god’] slept with that woman, and the Kauai women prostituted themselves to the foreigners for iron.”
When the English returned to Hawaii ten months later, Cook found the venereal disease had spread from Kauai to Maui and Hawaii Island, from one end of the archipelago to the other, in less than a year’s time.
That is how the Clap came to Hawaii in 1778-79, along with iron hammers and nails.
An iron spike also emerges from conflicting reports about the instrument of Cook’s demise—in the legend of the “Birmingham Dagger.”
According to Cook’s Lieutenant, a warrior’s club felled him on the beach in Kona.
According to others, “Cook was stabbed in the back by a crude dagger fashioned from the very iron that the English had traded to the Hawaiians.”
Bernard Smith, in Imagining the Pacific, a book from 1992 that is presumably self-conscious about Western constructions of imagined communities—about myth, that is,—contributes his own myth, of the Birmingham Dagger:
“Cook had taken with him iron from a Birmingham factory that, when fashioned into daggers, was used to cut him down on Kealakekua Beach.”
According to Hawaiians who witnessed Cook’s death, when interviewed by the missionary Rev. William Ellis fifty years later, they recalled Cook was “attacked with a spear,” and “stabbed in the back with a pahoa [dagger].”
The Rev. Ellis also asked the Hawaiians what induced some of them to steal Cook’s dinghy, the original misunderstanding that led to Cook’s demise. The Hawaiians evidently did not steal the small English boat to transport themselves, for their own canoes were more convenient, and they knew better how to manage them.
Rather, they took Cook’s dinghy because they saw it was “fastened with nails. These they wanted…to make fish hooks with.”
Which are we to believe? Cook’s Lieutenant, writing shortly after the incident? Hawaiian witnesses, through a missionary interpreter, half a century later? A postcolonial theorist, writing about imagined communities two centuries later? Or Susanna Moore, writing about all of the above in The Myth of Hawaii?
I would suggest that what sticks in the mind is probably what stuck in Cook’s back: the legend of iron nails and iron daggers. That is the version of Cook’s death that captivates listeners and readers, just as the iron railroad spike is the version of Joseph Kekuku’s origin story that sticks.
It’s an important, symbolic emblem, the iron spike. A totem of industrialism that captivates Hawaiian-American audiences like the sacred objects of a cargo cult.
It’s a better story, and it combines two disparate events into an overarching legendary history, connecting the Hawaiian who slayed Captain Cook with the Hawaiian who slayed American audiences in the twentieth century, Joseph Kekuku.
Even connecting, if you like, Joseph Kekuku to the railroad worker who brought Hawaiian guitar into mainland American roots music—“singing brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers, who sang that “Everybody Does it in Hawaii,” to the accompaniment of Hawaiian steel.
A railroad spike is a glorified nail, with an offset head, used to fasten rails and baseplates to railroad ties (the wooden cross-sections supporting the tracks). One could more easily imagine such a rough implement being fashioned into a dagger than a guitar slide—which is perhaps why Joseph Kekuku found it necessary to refine his instrument in shop class (if in fact he was inspired by a railroad spike at all, and not some other object) . . . .
Back in Hanalei village, on that dusty afternoon in June 2021, my son and I drew closer to the “Pin-i Pin-drix” mosaic. The individual pieces of the Hanalei Hendrix mural began to filter into focus. As the tacks, or ‘pins’ the muralist had used for his mosaic grew larger, we noticed that the bricoleur’s materials were crowned with flat, wide heads, of various sizes. Some were bright nickel, some the same rusty color as the rain-scored earth in the hills surrounding Hanalei—oxidized iron.
They were nails. The mural, a mosaic, was composed entirely of nails.
And so, “we meet again,” in one mural:
Captain Cook’s “Birmingham dagger” and iron nails
Princess Lili‘uokalani’s “Aloha ‘Oe” (Until we meet again)
Joseph Kekuku’s iron railroad spike
Jimmie Rodgers’ and Son House’s slide guitar
… condensed into the image of Jimi Hendrix’s “Story of Life.”
Not only that, but much of the transPacific exchange between West Coast America and the Hawaiian islands is implied in this mosaic as well.
Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle, half a century after Joseph Kekuku made his first U.S. mainland residence in that city.
In some ways, the Hawaiian slide guitar tradition hardly overlaps with the work of James Marshal Hendrix, who to the best of my knowledge only employed slide guitar twice in his prolific career, on official recordings.
Once in his inimitable version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and once in an earlier original: “May This Be Love.”
This is surprising, for a West Coast Seattle Boy, steeped in the slide-heavy blues tradition, and weened on the Southern “Chitlin Circuit.”
While the slide guitar in “All Along the Watchtower” makes but a brief appearance, “May This Be Love” is built around the sound—and the sound is more Hawaiian than blues.
The lyrics to “May This Be Love,” the only Hendrix song to employ slide guitar front-and-center, are highly suggestive of Hawaii. The opening lines reference waterfalls and rainbows, personifying them as the singer’s beloved, much as the beloved in “Aloha ‘Oe” is personified in the landscape of Maunawili.
In addition to Hendrix’s employment, conscious or not, of “Aloha ‘Oe’s” lyric—“Until we meet again”—in “The Story of Life,” this suggests another compelling reason the Hanalei muralist may have invoked Hendrix and Hawaii, together, not far from the site of Taylor Camp’s hippie commune, tucked amidst the waterfalls where rainbows were born, according to Hawaiian mythology.
At the same time the hippie commune at Taylor Camp was getting back to nature, Hendrix was getting together with (suffering the presence of) UFO cultists on the island of Maui, where he participated in the making of an outdoor concert film and soundtrack album, Rainbow Bridge.
With a bit of patience, fans can enjoy this curious document, witness the Seattle guitarist entertain another sort of Hawaiian commune, and frolic atop the windward pass of Pali Maui, where the gusts are powerful enough to make members of Hendrix’s entourage jump and fly:
The film documents “Dolly Dagger” (Hendrix’s girlfriend) et al leaping into the wind, momentarily suspended in midair above the slopes of Maui for seconds at a time—an experience akin to the falling sensation that impressed Hendrix during his parachuting days in the 82nd Airborne Division.
That flying sensation from the airborne infantry purportedly inspired the sliding descent behind the rainbows and waterfalls of “May This Be Love.” And the title of one of Jimi Hendrix’s most moving instrumentals, which recreates the sound of sea gulls, “Pali Gap” (the soundtrack to the clip above) is derived from his experiences on windy Maui.
Hendrix aside, the transPacific exchange between West Coast America and Hawaii is undeniable, and guitar-related. Recall the major California companies, Fender and Rickenbacker, whose inception revolved around producing early, electric models of the Hawaiian steel guitar.
Musical instruments aside, it’s easy to conjure Hawaii’s royal sport, and West Coast America’s adoptive one, in the same breath: surfing (which features prominently in Rainbow Bridge).
California, guitars, and surfing aside, the first English explorers to visit the islands migrated back-and-forth between Hawaii and the West Coast, particularly the Pacific Northwest around Seattle. During the ten months that elapsed between Cook’s first visit to Hawaii and his fateful return, he explored the Pacific Northwest—including the several parts of it now named after Cook’s midshipman, George Vancouver. Even after Cook’s grizzly death, George Vancouver was wont to return to Hawaii, to decompress after long voyages—which sounds a lot like a Hawaiian vacation.
Personally speaking, in the twenty-first century, I was impressed by the number of Hawaiian guides, parking lot attendants, and other members of the tourism service industry whose eyes lit with recognition when I told them we were from Oregon. They attested their knowledge of our state in the names of small towns, obscure suburbs, and tiny Christian universities, where their relatives lived and studied, before, most often, returning to Hawaii.
Consciously, one must think, the Hanalei muralist did an impeccable job condensing Hawaiian-American iconography into a single image laden with culturo-historical significance. I’ve yet to pinpoint the artist’s name, despite several phone calls and emails to businesses adjacent to the mural (one shopkeeper did divulge a possible name, a man’s, while I was there in person, but it escapes me). I know not whether he was a Hanelei hippie or an indigenous Hawaiian, neither or both, perhaps some other cultural combination—Hawaii is bountiful with cross-fertilization. Whoever he is, he’s a master manipulator of symbols and iconography. But he is far from the first, or the most momentous.
That honor belongs to a woman, another Queen, before Lili’uokalani. One of those personified female “islands” from the Hawaiian proverb about the royal archipelago surrounding King Kamehameha.
His favorite wife, Ka‘ahumanu.
After Cook was killed on the beach at Kealakekua Bay, his scalp was reportedly kept as a relic of Lono, or a momento of victory, remaining in the possession of one of the most consequential figures in the latter-day history of old Hawaii, soon to be king.
King Kamehameha, who was a warrior at the time of Cook’s death, said to be wounded by gunfire in the struggle on the beach where Cook was killed, inserted himself into the myth of Captain Cook in ways that were both contradictory and politically expedient.
To his people, Kamehameha was the warrior who fought to prevent his uncle, the chief Kalāniopu’u, from being taken hostage by Cook (as leverage, until Cook’s stolen dinghy was returned). As far as the foreigners were concerned, however, Kamehameha led them to believe an unfounded rumor that he actually poisoned chief Kalāniopu’u himself, in revenge for Cook’s death. To the English, Kamehameha also insisted he wasn’t on the island at the hour of Cook’s demise.
However, the most savvy manipulator of symbols during this turning point in Hawaiian history was Kamehameha’s favorite, and fiercely independent, wife (later, his widow). A fearless woman who enjoyed surfing, flirting, and the English custom of drinking and smoking a pipe. One of the most powerful females in Hawaiian history: Ka‘ahumanu.
After Kamehameha’s death, she assumed joint regency of the newly-united Hawaiian Kingdom with her son.
Prior to his death, Kamehameha, with the help of British firearms and one loyal Englishman to instruct him in their use (John Young), consolidated his power over all but one island in the archipelago, which had been warring amongst itself for centuries.
Kauai was the one rebel holdout, the only isle to remain independent during Kamehameha’s unifying conquest—“I am you, searching to be free.”
By the time of Kamehameha’s death, though she was not as highborn as his other wives, Ka‘ahumanu had cleverly positioned herself to assume control of Kamehameha’s kingdom, by adopting one of the king’s biological sons from a higher-born queen, prince Liholiho. Ka‘ahumanu set herself and Liholiho up to rule the kingdom together.
Within months of her husband’s death, Queen Ka‘ahumanu instituted nothing less than a cultural revolution, undoing a thousand years of traditional Polynesian spirituality and tradition.
Hawaiian society at that time was still governed by a system of strict cultural taboos (kapu) concerning every aspect of life, especially royalty and deity. The first thing Ka‘ahumanu did, besides assume rulership with her adoptive son, was break these taboos, ordering the sacred idols and temples on which they depended burnt to the ground.
The most uncanny aspect of this cultural upheaval, aside from the abrupt violence against a millennium of tradition, was the timing.
At the very moment Ka‘ahumanu was solidifying her control of the kingdom and instituting a policy of revolutionary iconoclasm in 1819, the first congregation of American missionaries was en route to deliver a new Protestant spirituality to replace the old Hawaiian one, which Ka‘ahumanu had just helpfully destroyed, without knowing it. The missionaries, sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, led by Hiram Bingham, arrived in 1820.
The timing of Ka‘ahumanu’s cultural revolution wasn’t completely arbitrary. The death of a king such as Kamehameha was always followed by a period of sanctioned lawlessness, in which all kapu were temporarily suspended to accommodate ritual mourning.
Yet the coincidence is none-the-less striking, almost as suspicious as Captain Cook’s arrival during the Makahiki Festival of Lono, or the supposed prophecy that Lono would return as a light-skinned being.
The power of suggestion is heightened in such circumstances, and it’s difficult to determine, without further evidence or documentation, which truly came first, the chicken or the egg—the missionaries or Ka‘ahumanu’s religious iconoclasm. The best evidence available suggests that the missionaries’ arrival was preceded by iconoclasm and cultural revolution, rather than precipitating it. Kamehameha was dead for almost a year before the missionaries arrived.
Like the death of Kamehameha, Captain Cook’s arrival also spurred a wave of taboo-breaking among female Kauaians, which could suggest that Cook’s arrival had already primed the Hawaiians for transgression long before the missionaries met Ka‘ahumanu. Or it could suggest that any introduction of foreign influence, including missionaries, might occasion such taboo-breaking. Or perhaps neither—the case of Ka‘ahumanu seems to suggest the Hawaiians were perfectly capable of breaking their own taboos without the intervention of foreigners. As Susanna Moore, and numerous anthropologists, have pointed out: taboos are made to be broken.
What’s indisputable is Ka'ahumanu’s willingness to seize an opportunity the missionaries provided, once the Protestant evangelists arrived from Boston. Though she would not officially convert to Christianity for another five years, eventually adopting the regal English name Elizabeth (another symbolic master stroke), both Ka‘ahumanu and her son Liholiho were intrigued by new developments with the missionaries.
Without the old traditions to fall back on, they as much as their subjects were susceptible to foreign influence: in material goods, lifestyle, and technology, as well as spirituality.
Ka‘ahumanu aligned herself with Hiram Bingham, the new ‘high priest’ from abroad, and willfully executed a circular tour of the islands with Bingham in tow—in direct opposition to the route which Captain Cook, and Lono, navigated: clockwise. Susanna Moore considers this to be another self-conscious act of iconoclasm on Ka‘ahumanu’s part, this time with an eye for power in league with Hiram Bingham: Ka‘ahumanu as the anti-Lono, touring the islands backwards with her Protestant heretic. (At least one archeological historian has challenged this theory, however.)
The Kamehameha dynasty, which Ka‘ahumanu and Liholiho assumed control over, would last another seventy years, and prove to be Hawaii’s last, finally overthrown with Princess Lili’uokalani in the coup of 1893. At various times, the Hawaiian Monarchy tried to ally itself with Britain over the United States, just as Ka‘ahumanu made overtures to Hiram Bingham’s U.S. missionaries when Britain was the dominant foreign influence in Hawaii.
What we see during this period from 1820-1893 is an initially savvy attempt, on Ka‘ahumanu’s part, to maintain a balance of power amid shifting political realities. Ultimately, we see the acquiescence of Ka‘ahumanu and Kamehameha’s descendants, likewise capitulating to U.S. foreign power in order to retain a modicum of their own. Plus, the division of royal lands into smaller parcels, a practice not wholly anathema to Hawaiian tradition, but one which was previously devoid of legal concepts about vested ownership in perpetuity. Finally, the shameful seizure of those lands by American agricultural and business interests—sugar cane and Dole pineapples.
Historical hindsight tells us that the Hawaiians were manipulated and taken advantage of, which is ultimately true—“businessmen they drink my wine, come and dig my earth,” as the song goes.
What popular history often elides is the vested interests of the Hawaiian Monarchy in the new Anglo-American status quo, their own agency in determining Hawaii’s future—however limited that agency may have proven in the face of Anglo-American firepower. Pop history also ignores the possibility that this process was set in motion by Ka‘ahumanu’s taboo-busting, even before the arrival of American missionaries, the spiritual vanguard of the nationstate that would ultimately annex Hawaii and strip her of self-determination. The last chapter, the American business one, is undeniably foul, and unjust. The chapters preceding it are more complex, and difficult to parse neatly.
Parsing my own preconceptions, I find they’re usually challenged whenever I scratch deeper into Hawaii’s historical and mythological soil.
‘Missionaries ruined Hawaii’ once seemed a self-evident truism to me, bolstered, ironically, by the semi-chauvinistic, romantic observations of someone like Jack London. Reading Susanna Moore, I come to the conclusion that, not only was this anti-missionary attitude shared by the maritime merchant class of Europeans in Hawaii, who were constantly at odds with their stuffy puritan neighbors—merchants who ultimately proved much more instrumental in the despoliation of Hawaii themselves—but that the missionaries were as much aided by the royal Hawaiian thirst for spirito-political power, as the merchants were abetted by the royal Hawaiian taste for European liquor and materialism.
The Filipino-Hawaiian float tour guide, who robbed me of one of my illusions about the categorical evils of the plantation system (which seemed like a pretty safe assumption at the time), robbed me of another assumption.
When I tried to confide my distaste about attending a missionary-sponsored luau feast on Kauai several years ago (the only luau available on that island at the time), I mentioned this as evidence of something I’d heard about Kauai: it lacked a strong luau culture, compared with other islands. The guide seemed taken aback.
In part because, as he suggested, Kauai does indeed have a luau culture. But mostly, I think, because I’d implied that the Disneyland atmosphere at this thoroughly Christianized, cheesy luau ceremony— boasting a mechanical volcano, and as many ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indonesian’ dancers as hula ones—was somehow inauthentic, being staged by Christian missionaries.
I glanced at the chain necklace the guide was wearing, the pendant of which was a very large, stylized cross, with an ichthyic fish on it, and realized that a great many local Hawaiians today, like Queen Ka‘ahumanu in the nineteenth century, subscribe, at least in part, to the “colonizer’s” evangelical faith, which I had nearly offended.
Hawaii, like the rest of America, is a complex place. It is perhaps easier to become aware of one’s own faulty assumptions in a new state, particularly one defined by multicultural currents from sources as disparate as Portugal (whence the ukulele) and Japan.
I take these crumbling assumptions as a blessing, and assume again, that whatever I might learn from, say, a half-Filipino tour guide, may not apply to someone else on the same island—the wholly indigenous residents of one district of Kauai, who prefer to remain isolated in a neighborhood where law enforcement refuses to trespass, for example.
I’m comfortable recanting anti-militarism, or at least suspending it, in the face of the many Hawaiians, like my tour guide, who served their country, as well as their families, in the U.S. Armed Forces—a syncretic extension of traditional Hawaiian warrior-culture, re-channeled into mainstream U.S. patriotism and military enthusiasm.
My mind will even relish (as my tongue recoils from), Spam “sushi.”
Another cultural trace of U.S. military intervention in Hawaii. A beautiful if—(personally speaking)—unappetizing culinary totem, connecting the U.S. and Japan, former enemies, through the crossroads of Pearl Harbor. An abominable delicacy, of salted pork lips and assholes, served like raw fish, containing multitudes.
It’s time to fly away home, and listen to radio Public Service Announcements about the invasion of mainland gonorrhea on Kauai, en route to the airport in Lihue.
Until we meet again.