Winter Books
Q&A with Rodney Morales, When the Shark Bites, Melal, Eddie Would Go, The Shimmering and more.

John Wythe White, Ryan Senaga, Chad Blair, Mark Cunningham, Marcia Morse, Curt Sanburn, Robb Bonnell and Betty Santos

November 20, 2002

Q&A:
Rodney Morales

John Wythe White

"I was successful with fiction from the beginning," says Rodney Morales, author of the recently released novel, When the Shark Bites (University of Hawai‘i Press; see review, this page), "but music was always my first love, and after college I wrote a whole bunch of songs." He did some performing but "was never good at the business aspect," so he went to graduate school in the mid-’80s for an M.A. in English at UH-Mänoa, where he now teaches creative writing. Bamboo Ridge Press published a book he edited, Ho‘i Ho‘i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell (1984), and The Speed of Darkness (1988), a collection of his short stories. When the Shark Bites is his first novel.

Your novel is enjoyable, with a strong plot and an entertaining assortment of characters — serious and comic, heroic and cowardly, ethical and corrupt. In several ways, it’s not unlike a popular crime novel, or mystery.
There is a sense of mystery to this story, and I’d like it to be popular, but not without sacrificing any so-called literary elements. I wanted the best of both worlds. I like to read mystery novels, and I’ve been reading a lot of James Ellroy. For the good and bad, just to get a feel.

Your narrative structure is complex. The story jumps back and forth in time and is told by several different characters. How did you put it together?
It was crazy. I drew maps and designs, structures to find out where things connected. It began with a short story that won the Honolulu Magazine fiction contest eight years ago. That story ended up in the middle of the novel. I had three other stories that were related, and I wrote around and in between them until I began seeing a chronology. It was an odd way to write, very challenging. I showed it prematurely to my girlfriend, who’s also my main editor, and she probably thought it was a piece of crap. She couldn’t make any sense of it, but that was the feedback I needed. I knew I had holes to fill in, so I did and then showed it to another friend. By then it was much fuller, and he gave me some advice, and when I brought it back to my girlfriend, she then saw the story. She hated my original ending, and she has better instincts than anybody I know, so I changed it. That kind of back-and-forth with key people helped me take it to another level. I also had reader critiques from the UH Press, outside readers, and one was especially helpful. I’m so pleased that perceptive people read my book in its earlier forms.

The story opens at the time of the protests over the bombing of Kaho‘olawe and follows the Hawaiian movement to the present. Were you a part of that in the early years?
In 1970, when I entered UH, I walked right into the anti-war movement, and I was involved in protests which spilled over into Hawaiian or local issues. By the time Kaho‘olawe emerged, I was burnt out. There were a lot of personality conflicts, and I retreated. But people like George Helm drew me back in, and it came together for me a few years later when I did research and edited the book on him and Kimo Mitchell. I thought, This is the kind of contribution I want to make. Once I realized that, I knew I had to get some distance from the scene to be able to look at it and write about it. I felt really close to some Project Kaho‘olawe ‘Öhana members over the years, getting to know them through my research. I hardly see them now, but I still feel close to them.

What’s your ethnic background?
Puerto Rican.

Totally?
Totally, whatever that means, because it’s a mix that includes Spanish, African and Indian. I was born and raised here. My parents were born and raised here. My grandparents came here as children around 1900, after a hurricane devastated Puerto Rico. That’s when the big wave of Puerto Rican immigrants came to Hawai‘i. It’s a story I might write about someday, but in my work I think it’s weird and oddly ethnocentric to write about Puerto Ricans, because I grew up in such a multicultural community. I have Puerto Rican relatives here and there, most of them mixed, and Hawaiian, Asian and Filipino relatives. I married into Japanese — married and divorced — and a lot of the people I’m closest to are Asian and Hawaiian, people I grew up with and have known all my life, my best friends. And I have many haole colleagues I’m close to at the university. So that’s what I write about, the world I know.

For you, is it easy or difficult to write?
It’s both. When I’m in a groove, in the middle of a story, that’s when it’s easiest, when there’s momentum and I can pick up where I left off quite easily. The hardest thing is starting again, finding something with energy in it. I have so many unfinished pieces on my hard drive, abandoned because the energy wasn’t there. Some I look at years later, and it’s still not there. But I don’t want to throw them away.

As a full-time teacher, is it a problem finding time to write?
The students need attention, so I put in long hours and my writing often gets lost for a while. But it’s a willing sacrifice, and I know I’ll get back to it. I’m always writing anyway; there’s something going on in my head all the time. It’s just that I can’t sit at the computer as often as I’d like to.

Do you think fiction writing can really be taught?
Some days I think it’s very teachable, some days I don’t feel as confident. All I can offer a student is my undivided attention. Some are gifted and are going to be writers no matter what any teacher does, but some will succeed with the help of teachers, and I like to think I’m doing that — encouraging the ones with talent, prodding them to keep writing. It’s a game where only the strong survive. It’s not easy to be a successful fiction writer in this world, and many will give up. It takes passion, dedication and stamina.

When the novel appears
Rodney Morales’ When the Shark Bites: the much-awaited, sure-footed follow-up to The
Speed of Darkness

When the Shark Bites
Rodney Morales
UH Press, 2002;
$9.95, 360 pages

Ryan Senaga

     Like The Catcher in the Rye, Rodney Morales’ short-story collection The Speed of Darkness was more than a popular work of fiction. Published in 1988 by Bamboo Ridge Press, the seminal tales changed the way local people viewed their lives. The fact that ordinary folks could be portrayed in readable literature without any sort of overt academic pretensions or Pidgin "gadgetry" weaved into the text gave hope that the Island way of life could be set down in a compelling and entertaining way. Most importantly, Morales demonstrated that contemporary lives in this state could be depicted with an emphasis on both story and local style. For better or for worse, as a textbook in English classes all over the state, Morales’ collected works spawned an armada of would-be fiction writers — including this humbled reviewer.
     A full-length novel to follow Morales’ collection of shorts seemed to be a given, but like the poor and stranded in Casablanca, local readers waited and waited for something new to appear. During that period, Morales published a few more short stories in various magazines and journals, and most significantly, edited Ho‘i Ho‘i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, but there was no sign of a novel … until now.
     When the Shark Bites tells the complex story of a journalist/student researching the disappearance/death of a notoriously charismatic Hawaiian activist named Keoni. (Shades of George Helm?) Much of the research involves interviewing the financially strapped couple Henry and Kanani Rivera, two people who were once closely involved with Keoni.
     What starts out as a mystery untangles into a nuanced portrait of contemporary O‘ahu life; a study of how families simply survive. Henry and Kanani get their own first-person perspective chapters in which they tell the interviewer their sides of the story. There are other shifts into third-person narrative that allow the observation of the characters outside the basic plot: Henry flirting with his son’s teacher and eventually falling into an affair; or Kanani’s flashback to her secret one-night-stand with Keoni. Their two sons, Makena and Analu, in turn, have their own stories to tell. Friends and neighbors of the family have their own "I" chapters, with their own anecdotes and so on.
     It is almost as if the thriller aspect of the novel is simply an excuse to portray Island living and how local people love, grow, work, hibachi and hurt one another. To a degree, the political intrigue at the plot’s center is sometimes a hindrance — the living characters are more gripping than the dead ones.
     Particularly fine are the sections devoted to Makena and his slow growth to manhood; how he learns to surf from a lifeguard he thought of as a shark monster in childhood, how he kisses a girl for the first time while Hale‘iwa waves crash around them and how he and his surfing mentor run down a steep, four-mile road. All of these moments echo Morales’ finest stories in The Speed of Darkness.
     Another section that deserves to be archived for academic posterity is the heartbreaking chapter devoted to Analu and how he believes his grandfather has been reincarnated as a parakeet in a pet store. "I wen’ stare and stare at da lovebird. Da buggah stare back wit’ his head tilted, ja’ like Grampa. Had fo’ be him. He was on sale fo’ one hundred an’ fifty dollahs. Dass cheap fo’ one granfaddah. In fack, I heard Mommy say to Daddy dat da coffin cos’ t’ousans of dollahs. Jes’ da coffin. But da coffin only gon’ have his body. Da bird get his spirit."
     Once the boy begins his trek to Ala Moana Center with all the allowance he has, Morales has sucked you in. Although it is a relevant chapter to the novel, it can also stand alone as an addition to classic local literature anthologies.
     Sucking the reader in may be Morales’ most potent talent. His narrative style isn’t flashy. There are no showy gimmicks: the Pidgin is relatively straightforward and easy to translate, the sentences are clean and simple, and the author’s trademark style of injecting pop music and their lyrics into the narrative serves as a soundtrack to accompany the novel’s cinematic imagery.
     What it all amounts to is a sheer velocity of page-turning. Granted, Morales occasionally struggles with some of the dialogue for younger characters — they sometimes utter words and phrases that don’t ring right in their mouths — but Morales is one of the few writers in Hawai‘i skillful enough to keep the eyes moving in sync with the brain and at a very rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t be another 14 years before he returns to fiction again.

A particularly bad Friday
First-time novelist Robert Barclay spins a horrific and hopeful Marshallese tale.    

Melal
Robert Barclay
UH Press, 2002;
$14.95, 300 pages

Chad Blair

     Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel has said that it is unwise to compare suffering because all suffering is terrible. Yet, when the women of a culture give birth to seriously deformed stillborns that resemble nothing so much as jellyfish, it is difficult to disagree that theirs is an especially difficult cross to bear.
     The people in question are the Marshallese, their home some 70 square miles of low-lying coral atolls in the Western North Pacific, their cruel curse the lingering poison of radiation from nuclear-bomb testing by the United States. First-time author Robert Barclay blends both fact and fiction, the horrific and the sublime to tell a tale of a defenseless and innocent people struggling to survive after near annihilation by an ostensibly good and powerful nation.
     As might be expected, Barclay’s Melal, softly subtitled "A Novel of the Pacific," offers up (some) American characters as ignorant savages and (some) Marshallese as enlightened natives. Christianity takes hard knocks, while the antics of the Marshallese gods prove instructional, and entertaining. But Melal is neither a white man’s unburdening nor solely about nuclear fallout. Ultimately, it’s an absorbing, original read about a Marshallese family, and a significant contribution to the canon of literature by and/or about the Pacific.
     The book is three-fold in the telling, each story overlapping and undergirding the others, all happening on Good Friday of 1981. In the first, Rujen Keju, a middle-aged Marshallese widower living on the island of Ebeye, commutes, as he does every day, three miles by boat to the neighboring island of Kwajalein. The largest island in the largest atoll in the world, "Kwaj" is a gated country club for the 3,000 or so Americans stationed there. It’s also a missile range, its vast lagoon the target for unarmed warheads fired from California.
     From the beginning of Rujen’s day, a series of mishaps develop, each a portent of some impending doom to come. They intensify later during his menial job and again at the island’s Catholic church service, where Rujen is an usher.
     Also that morning, Rujen’s two teenage sons, Jebro and Nuke, motor their skiff from Ebeye across the lagoon to the island of Tar-Wöj. Though it is off limits because it falls in the missile target range, Tar-Wöj is Jebro’s birthplace and the resting place of his paternal grandfather, Ataji. Unlike Rujen, Ataji had strongly resisted Western assimilation, particularly Christianity.
     Rujen’s late wife, Iia, was among those irradiated from fallout after the Bravo test on Bikini when she was a child. That’s why Jebro, 18, named after "the king of the stars, the greatest hero ever in the Marshall Islands," has six fingers on his left hand, and why Nuke, 12, is named for "the most powerful thing on Earth."
     The third story is the most complicated, and the most fanciful. Noniep, "the dwarf who speaks in dreams," engages Etao, a playful, shape-shifting spirit, on and around Tar-Wöj. Noniep is a sorcerer-healer, and his mission is to convince Etao to help him save the Marshallese from wicked demons, deliver the souls of the jellyfish babies to the ancestral home of the dead and silently imbue Jebro with the means to elevate his downtrodden people.
     Meanwhile, back on Kwajalein, Rujen’s bad Friday has just gotten worse.
     Barclay briefly delineates colonialism’s brutal legacies of forced labor and disease — from the Spanish, the Germans and the Japanese, and finally the Americans, who delivered the bomb but also Pepsi and Happy Days. The Marshallese have little connection to their cultural traditions, most prominently the fishing skills that once sustained them. When Jebro teaches Nuke how to catch a turtle, the readers sense the possibilities of recovering a lost way of life. "That’s my way out of the hole," Jebro explains.
     Ebeye is referred to as the "shit island," where naked children play on a rickety pier over shallows clotted with used Pampers and other garbage. Etao’s teasings often involve bathroom humor. Rujen works at Kwajalein’s sewage treatment plant. Message: The whole atoll is a shit hole in need of a giant flush.
     Barclay, 39 and a doctoral candidate in English at UH-Mänoa, excels at description, narrative and character. Readers familiar with Kwajalein will immediately recognize the place, while those unfamiliar with the Marshallese and their islands will be transported. While the episodes involving the Marshallese gods ramble on at times, the stories of Rujen and Jebro, both richly drawn characters, are high-quality storytelling.
     Melal is a little hokey in parts. The foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed, too. But Melal succeeds, and is timely. Though set in the early months of President Reagan’s first term, his Star Wars missile-defense system would soon be tested on Kwajalein. That foolish, wasteful experiment has been revitalized by the Bush administration, which just last week was reported to be considering resumption of underground nuclear testing after a 10-year moratorium.
     Just as disturbing, the plight of the Marshallese has improved little, except to say that more of them are moving to Hawai‘i each year. A half century after the first H-bomb detonation and 20 years after Melal’s setting, over 12,000 Marshallese are crammed into an island slum roughly the size of Ala Moana Center. The only other escape is by suicide. Melal offers hope.

Honolulu Weekly Associate Editor Chad Blair graduated from Kwajalein Junior/Senior High School in 1979.

It’s about time
Eddie Aikau rocked our world. His story will rock yours.

Eddie Would Go: The Story of Eddie Aikau, Hawaiian Hero
Stuart Holmes Coleman
MindRaising Press, 2001;
$24.95, 271 pages

Mark Cunningham

     Stuart Coleman’s new biography of surfing/lifeguard legend Eddie Aikau is fantastic. From his very humble beginnings on Maui to brother Clyde’s emotional victory in the first "Eddie" in ’86, it’s all there. But it’s not just about Eddie. It’s about Hawaiian history, culture, values and especially ‘ohana. It’s about the Vietnam War. It’s about the ’60s and ’70s transitioning from "wine, women and song" to "drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll." It’s about Duke Kahanamoku. It’s about the infancy of professional surfing. It’s about the creation of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and Hokule‘a. It’s about time.
     I grew up in Niu valley down the road from Nainoa Thompson. I learned to swim and surf in the lee of Diamond Head. I poured over Surfer and Surfing magazines memorizing names, captions, results and stories. I went to Punahou where Van Dyke, Cole and Pfeffer were teachers, and Lopez, Hakman, Jones, Blears and Hemmings were recent graduates. I lived and lifeguarded on the North Shore for 18 years. What I’m trying to say is, I know most of the characters in the book, and Coleman has captured them and their stories to a T.
     Coleman’s writing doesn’t get in the way; it’s always clear and concise. His research, interviews and quotes paint a very realistic and believable picture of Eddie and the times. His descriptions of the beaches and lineups, of the water action — the thrill and rush of big-wave surfing and the terror and fear of near-death wipeouts — all ring true without being overly dramatic or corny.
     What a treat to read again about the big-wave pioneers of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Stories from and about Greg Noll, John Kelly, Sammy Lee and Peter Cole remind readers that at one point, surfing Waimea bay was thought impossible. Eddie’s early mastery of — and commitment to — the huge surf at Waimea made him the obvious choice to be one of the North Shore’s first two lifeguards; his partner and dear friend, Butch Van Artsdalen, was the other.
     Eddie’s classic MO of surfing, rescuing and passing on the paperwork is from a much simpler, pre-lawyers-lawsuits-and-liability era. His mentoring of young lifeguards and aspiring big-wave riders is unparalleled. Eddie’s brothers, Clyde and Solomon, were also City & County lifeguards at one time. Clyde has since run beach concessions at Waikïkï and has shared with countless visitors the joy and stoke of surfing and canoeing. Sister Myra has been an ocean recreation specialist for nearly 30 years and has taught swimming, snorkeling, surfing and lifesaving skills to thousands of O‘ahu youth. Altogether, the Aikau family’s impact on ocean safety and the sport of kings is immeasurable.
     The support and importance of family is perhaps the most dominant theme throughout the book. Sharing and caring are two traits that Eddie and the Aikau ‘ohana taught to many people. They may not have had much, but boy, were they generous! From literally the food on the table, to the secrets of the sea, to the songs and music in their hearts, the Aikaus shared. To put it mildly, the family lü‘au, held at their place on the backside of Punchbowl, were the stuff of urban legend. The kaukau, the "swipe" (Hawaiian moonshine), the antics and entertainment were over the top.
     Of course, it wasn’t all good times. Coleman doesn’t ignore the hard realities of Eddie’s strained marriage and the terrible impact on him of his brother Gerald’s senseless death in a car accident — after Gerald had survived two tours of Air Force duty in Vietnam.
     A large portion of this biography is devoted (deservedly so) to the early days of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and the Hokule‘a. To read along as the shared dream of Tommy Holmes, Herb Kane and Ben Finney becomes a reality is truly inspiring. Representing adventure, cultural revival and science respectively, the three men rigged up one of the major cornerstones of the Hawaiian Renaissance. The research and development, trials and errors, dedication and passion for Hokule‘a and what it represents are thoroughly covered. The excitement and trepidation of embarking on a journey of this magnitude are described vividly.
     Heartfelt are the painful recollections of crewmembers, navigator Thompson and Capt. David Lyman of that fateful voyage of March 1978.
     As you can tell, I’m a lifeguard, not a writer. My apologies to Coleman and the Aikaus for not adequately describing how good this book is or the scope of material it covers. Bravo and mahalos to all who made it possible.

State of the art   
Context is everything: an academic survey of Pacific art and its interpretation.

Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning
Edited by Anita Herle,
Nick Stanley, Karen Stevenson and Robert L. Welsch
UH Press, 2002;
$48.00, 455 pages

Marcia Morse

     Traditional art, tourist art, indigenous practices, contemporary expressions — What is Pacific art, and what is the state of the art for those who study it?
     Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning is the sixth volume of collected papers from the Pacific Arts Association (PAA) and has been edited by four scholars who are also among its contributors. This is very much a text by scholars, for scholars — but it also has relevance for the general, committed reader with an interest in Pacific island cultures.
     Since the creation of PAA and its first symposium in 1974, an important shift in perspective has occurred: from an analysis of styles linked to specific places or regions, to a more dynamic and process-oriented view of cultural continuity and change.
     Pacific Art is structured in five sections. Part 1, "Interrogating the past through the photographic image," includes three studies that focus on collections of images documenting specific island cultures.
     Part 2, "Defining and contesting identities through art," addresses the ways in which Pacific peoples understand and make visible their distinct identities through various forms of artmaking. Of particular interest to Hawai‘i readers will be Joshua A. Bell’s article on the new home for the Center for Hawaiian Studies at UH-Mänoa and Angela J. Neller’s thoughtful and provocative essay, "From utilitarian to sacred: The transformation of a traditional Hawaiian object."
     Part 3, "Exploring museums, collectors and meanings," raises important questions of the diasporic nature of much of Pacific art, collected and relocated in contexts often far removed from its origins. The authors of essays included here ask us to consider: How do objects mean? What kinds of narratives do they convey? How does a change of context (from village to museum, for example) change the stories objects tell? How are displaced objects still meaningful for their makers?
     Specific case studies are included in Part 4, "Studying agency and objects." These studies have much in common with traditional art-historical and anthropological research, but they are also sensitive to postmodern perspectives on social and cultural context, and the layered complexity of both physical production and interpreted meaning.
     "Negotiating change in contemporary Pacific art," Pacific Art’s last section, should be especially relevant to those interested in the evolving world of contemporary Native Hawaiian art. The traditional and the contemporary are weighed in the context of efforts to maintain the viability of Pacific art in the face of tourist markets, disparate aesthetic influences and other global forces. Karen Stevenson’s essay, "The island in the urban: Contemporary Pacific art in New Zealand," has special resonance for Hawai‘i in the way in which it analyzes issues of identity, hybridity and place. The essay explores the conflict between "ideologies of captured objects and dying cultures and the surging lifeblood of the urban Pacific."

Talent unbound
Keola Beamer’s thrillingly uneven stories herald a new day for Hawaiian literature.

The Shimmering: Ka ‘Olili
‘Ohe Books, 2002;
$14.95, 208 pages

Curt Sanburn   

Musician Keola Beamer’s self-published collection of short stories, his impressive first stab at literature, comes packaged inside some high-toned flattery. The back cover of the paperback includes breathless blurbs from no less than Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Lee Cataluna, Glenn Grant and James D. Houston.
     No doubt about it: This guy is talented, but literature is hard work and demands ultimate control. The eight wildly uneven, mostly first-person stories come across as barely formed big ideas that Beamer loads into his vigorous storytelling brain and lobs onto the page.
     Enjoy the fireworks and read them anyway — for Beamer’s deep conviction, for his sensitivity and for his synthetic, ancient/modern worldview.
     The book’s tour-de-force title story "The Shimmering" is a rhapsody on the theme of the goddess Pele’s fiery love for the half-man/half-pig demi-god Kamapua‘a, here rendered as a lonely, coast-haole volcanologist at Volcanoes National Park. With time on his hands, the haole takes a hula class in Hilo, gets into it and starts receiving mysterious love notes on his computer screen. His seismograph taps out the kahiko beats of the pahu. The ensuing Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde transformation (in an author’s note, Beamer divulges that Kamapua‘a is described in the ancient stories as a large foreigner with bright eyes) is lots of spooky fun, powered by Beamer’s keen sense of volcanoland’s weird effects, and of Pele’s wanton passions.
     The half-baked story "Pöhaku" tells of an insecure but successful Hawaiian painter, high and dry at a New York penthouse party, thinking with regret and longing of his youth, of an eternal pöhaku and an old fisherman at the Big Island fishing settlement at Miloli‘i. "I’m not a fraud," the artist concludes. "I am Hawaiian."
     In "Our Ticket to Cannes," Beamer charmingly explores relations between a man of the world and his hapless hänai younger brother, who’s trying to make a documentary from the perspective of an ‘a‘ama crab. Beamer contrives to construct things so he can have Barbara Walters say, "No can handle."
     In the story "Nä Iwi," a Kaimukï boy stops speaking Pidgin after a fierce firefight in Vietnam.
     Throughout, the unbridled, overly descriptive language is muscular and casual, yet knowing and original. Beamer’s moonlight is a "soft green light." Dialogue flows in and out of clear and compelling Pidgin. And Beamer’s sensitivities are real: "They had found the ache that extinction leaves in the human heart," he writes in "Hanau Hope," about the last ‘ö‘ö bird.
     Beamer’s stories are shot through with the risk-taking confidence and humor of a modern, worldly man who’s tethered to a profoundly Hawaiian worldview. Without nostalgia, he seems to be asking, How does Hawai‘i work now? At this stage of the literary game, that inquiry is as fresh as it gets.

Island Fire
An Anthology of Literature from Hawai‘i

Edited by Cheryl A. Harstad and James R. Harstad
UH Press, 2002;
$14.95, 230 pages

Robb Bonnell

Island Fire first appeared, more or less, 20 years ago as the classic "Hawai‘i" section within the larger anthology, Asian-Pacific Literature, taught to a generation of Island students and edited by curriculum specialists Cheryl A. Harstad and James R. Harstad. Revised, updated and expanded by the same editors, the "Hawai‘i" section has become the highly tote-able Island Fire: An Anthology of Literature from Hawai‘i. Happily for us, this retread delivers a nicely variegated chorus of Island voices, old and new.
     Author James D. Houston’s foreword stresses how previous anthologies of Hawaiian literature often began with the writings of British sailors instead of works by Hawaiians. This island anthology opens, appropriately enough, with the "Fire Chant for King Ka-lä-kaua," translated and edited by Mary K. Pukui and Alfons L. Korn, followed by three translations of "The Queen’s Prayer" by Queen Lili‘uokalani.
     What follows is an eclectic collection of chants and short stories, poetry and prose from the last 20 years, from an equally diverse collection of people.
     Certainly, some of the names one might expect to see are included. Lois-Ann Yamanaka contributes "Turtles," a 1991 poem about an encounter with an older, local character and a clash of ideas over how to perceive a bittersweet beachside moment. Maxine Hong Kingston offers "Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains," an excerpt from her 1980 book, China Men. Nora Okja Keller delivers an excerpt from her popular 1997 novel, Comfort Woman. Cathy Song has two poems from 1983, full of insight and acrimony, about what it means to be Chinese.
     Bamboo Ridge Press perennials Darrell H.Y. Lum and Eric Chock weigh in also. Lum’s entire one-act play, Oranges Are Lucky, invites the reader to bear witness to the growing gap between first- and second-generation Chinese relatives. Chock’s poems "Ancestry" and "Papio" present another kind of local voice, familiar immediately and underrepresented lately in local literature. Both poems speak in the first person, and Chock establishes a natural local voice without resorting to pidgin once.
     Island Fire also includes works by local scholars, young and old. Among them is an excerpt from the book Sachie, Daughter of Hawai‘i, by an alumna and former teacher and administrator at UH, Patsy S. Saiki. Three of the other pieces were written by local high school students and a fourth was written by an eighth-grader at University Laboratory School.
     One contributor is not thought of as an Island resident at all. Known for his swaggering, macho essays in various men’s magazines, Asa Baber’s "The Surfer" is an elegiac remembrance of a Hawaiian friend’s final days, which functions as a resigned farewell, circa 1980, to a fast-changing Hawai‘i. Grieving, the narrator says, "I decided that I did not want to be around when the valley was bought up and turned into a resort."
     It is this dichotomy, this true and inclusive diversity, that is the strength of the anthology. As a book, Island Fire might be more genuinely "melting pot" than most of its local shelf-mates.

Book Notes

Betty Santos

The Uncle’s Story
By Witi Ihimaera

     Holden Caulfield defined a good book as one where you get the impulse to call the author up to talk whenever you felt like it. After finishing The Uncle’s Story by Maori writer Witi Ihimaera (UH Press, 2002; $15.95, 373 pages) I wished I could ask him some questions and offer him my praise.
     The story is about a young Maori man, Michael Mahana, who returns to his family’s farm for his sister’s wedding and announces at the prenuptial dinner that he is gay. The family is coping with the thought of their daughter, Amiria, marrying a blond surfer from America, and Michael’s outburst in a moment of exasperation at his father triggers events that reveal the family’s dark secrets.
     Michael had been under pressure from Jason, his Pakeha (white) lover in Wellington, to "come out" to his family as an affirmation of his commitment. When Michael reveals his sexual identity, his father, unable to comprehend or believe it, disowns him and banishes him from the family farm.
     When he returns to Wellington, his lover has left him and he is visited by his spinster aunt, Pat. She tells Michael that she and his father had an older brother, Sam, whose name and memory has been expunged from the family record because of his homosexuality. She gives him a package containing Sam’s personal papers and diaries detailing his experiences in Vietnam combat and his love affair with Cliff Harper, a strikingly handsome American helicopter pilot.
     With this, the book moves back in time to Sam’s years growing up under the stifling hand of his father, tribe leader Arapeta, himself a veteran of World War II, renowned for his fearless exploits in combat. A 20th-century Maori warrior, Arapeta maintains absolute control over his family and village community. He gladly sends his son and two other young men off to war, to "maintain the fighting spirit that will ensure that the Maori does not become as weak as women."
     In the warrior culture of the Maori, women are on a lower rung of the hierarchy, and men who love men are at the very bottom. Arapeta has no idea when he sends his son off to his sacred mission "under the tapu of Tumatauenga the God of War ... To fight for the honour of your tribe," that Sam will return with Cliff Harper.
     When Arapeta discovers the nature of their relationship, he reacts brutally, setting off a chain of tragic events that Michael, decades later, attempts to resolve.
     Much of the book is the story of Sam’s tour of duty in Southeast Asia, and these scenes are skillfully written and vivid. Much like Tim O’Brian’s Vietnam tales, the stories have a dream-like, surreal quality. Think Apocalype Now meets Once Were Warriors. One of the strongest chapters deals with a My Lai-type incident triggered by an encounter with an elderly village woman. She invites Sam into her hut for a meal, and he is struck by the similarities between her simple hut and the whare of his grand aunt back on the marae. She offers him pho, but his lieutenant arrives and cuts the encounter short. Sam imagines he can understand her words: You are a boy. You were hungry, like all boys, and all boys must eat.
     Outside, the lieutenant chastises Sam’s naiveté: "Can’t you see what you did? When you accepted the old woman’s hospitality, you signed her and her husband’s death warrant."
     The combat that follows is horrific and mesmerizing. Later scenes in the bars and brothels offer some humorous relief from the horror and the immediacy of war while still illustrating the conflicts Sam is feeling.
     The oppositions of gay and straight, pakeha and Maori, male and female, colonizer and colonized, the individual and the tribe, are all explored by the story of Michael and his uncle Sam. Ihimara attempts to sort through these unresolved issues and their resulting dilemmas.
     He blends Maori myth into his fiction, using imagery such as "a mackerel sky" where the clouds appear like schools of fish, portending a key event to come. Signs and omens, such as an owl, appear to warn and bring forth one’s fate.
     The author’s passionate, muscular prose shows us the cyclical nature of destiny and the power of truth over secrets. The Uncle’s Story reminds us that often difficult decisions must be made to live one’s life fully.

Dismembering La¯hui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887
By Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio

     Is Dismembering La¯hui another example of so-called revisionist history or the true story? Jonathan Osorio carefully and with eminent scholarship builds his case, without preaching or boring the reader.
     It is notable that this "History of the Hawaiian Nation" ends at 1887, the year that King David Kaläkaua signed the Bayonet Constitution under duress. In Article 59 of this document, several conditions were mandated for a resident’s right to vote, effectively excluding many Native Hawaiians from a voice in their government, especially the maka‘äinana. Within the span of half a century, barely three generations, the lähui, the people, were "literally and figuratively dismembered" from their lands, cultural legacy, and their right to self-governance.
     The Mahele, which turned out to be great only for foreigners and some Hawaiians of chiefly class, unfolded between 1845 and 1850 and was a major cause of disenfranchisement. The genealogies and mana of the ali‘i, which had always been unquestioned as a factor in determining leadership, were no longer primary requirements for the right to govern. Ultimately, the Kingdom did not survive.
     Osorio has been working on this mo‘olelo for over 10 years, bringing together familiar sources and some surprising ones in order to form a readable and engaging Native view of a time of upheaval in Hawaiian history. He asserts that while Westerners look at history as their possession, the Kanaka Maoli feel they are bound to — and thus owned — by their history.
     Osorio warns that reparations are a threat to the revival of his people, because it will not relieve the colonized from the status of victim, but will allow the colonizer to obtain a sense of justice. "In the end," Osorio says, "nationhood is identity."
     I highly recommend this evenhanded yet passionate call for understanding and change.
     [Editor’s note: According to UH Press, Dismembering Ka Lähui ($22.95, 310 pages) is still in its first printing but stock is running out. A second printing is scheduled for early next year.]

The Rise and Fall of the O‘ahu Kingdom and An Ancient History of Wai‘anae
By Ross Cordy

     Ross Cordy has been researching Hawaiian archaeology and history since 1968, and is currently the chief of archaeology for the State Historic Preservation Division. The Rise and Fall of the O‘ahu Kingdom (Mutual Publishing, 2002; $10.95, 64 pages) details the events leading up to the conquering of O‘ahu by Maui and Big Island chiefs in the late 1700s. This volume, though slim, offers a concise, readable overview of the pre-contact history of the island.
     Wai‘anae has recently been the focus of many controversies, notably the use of Mäkua valley by the U.S. military. The district is filled with many important cultural and sacred sites. In An Ancient History of Wai‘anae (Mutual Publishing, 2002; $13.95, 164 pages), Cordy combines oral histories with archaeological information to provide an understanding of the rich cultural heritage of this area. Particularly interesting are the individual chapters on each ahupua‘a such as Nänäkuli and Lualualei.

New Moon, Bamboo Ridge No. 81, Spring 2002
Edited by Eric Chock and Darrell Lum

     As always, Bamboo Ridge’s latest quarterly ($10, 307 pages) provides a look at Hawai‘i literary voices, both new and familiar. Of interest are Lee Cataluna’s brief personality sketches of the characters we all have in our lives, such as your favorite relatives like "Tsukebe Uncle Richard" and "Crazy Auntie Cookie."
     Pidgin stories such as Cedric Yamanaka’s "A Hit Man Named Lilikoi" and Lisa Linn Kanae’s "Luciano and the Break Room Divas" give proof that Lee Tonouchi’s assertion "Dey say if you talk Pidgin, you no can" just doesn’t cut it.
     I’m glad to see more writing by Filipino authors such as Elmer Omar Pizo and Jennifer Santos Madriaga.

Buckaloose: Kaimuki School Days with Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole
By Sam Kong

     All of us have childhood memories of people we grew up with who went on to fame or notoriety. Some of my classmates went on to become artists, musicians, politicians and career criminals. Sam Kong attended Wai‘alae Elementary with Bruddah Iz at about the same time I was getting sent to the principal’s office at Mänoa Elementary — but that’s another story.
     I must admit to some bias toward Buckaloose (Mutual Publishing, 2002; $13.95, 56 pages), having seen it in manuscript form. As another reviewer has said, I wondered if this was just an attempt to cash in on a celebrity name.
     What I found, however, was a charmingly straightforward and affectionate memoir of growing up local — eating cone sushi for breakfast, playing marbles and Sky Inning, receiving gifts of homemade crackseed from the janitor you thought was a grouch. We all remember certain kids who had legendary status even way back then. Being friends with one of these favored ones gave you some extra status too.
     Kong mentions his music teacher, a Miss Medeiros, who was one of his favorites. Today, she is Pua Higgins, a retired music resource teacher who works with me selling books. She has said that even then, everyone knew that Israel had a special gift.
     This simple tale pays tribute to one of Hawai‘i’s most beloved musicians in a heartfelt and deceptively simple way. The stories are enhanced by the book’s design and some wonderful old photos.