Winter
Books
New Works by Maxine
Hong Kingston, Robert H. Stauffer, Morgan Blair, Kapulani Landgraf and
Bamboo Ridge
Chad Blair, Lesa Griffith, Jacquelyn Kim, Laurie Anne Agnese, Ryan Senaga and Li Wang
November 19, 2003
Land
Grab
A new analysis of the Great Mähele and
its aftermath reveals how Hawaiians lost their land, and how it influences
Hawai‘i today.
Kahana: How the land was lost
Robert H. Stauffer
UH Press, 2003; 265 pages, $38
The
following is excerpted from Kahana: How the Land Was Lost, and
adapted for Honolulu Weekly.
There can be no argument that Hawaiians lost
their land in the 19th century. In the roughly 50 years prior to the 1893
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, 90 percent of all land in the islands
passed into the lease, control or ownership of non-Hawaiians.
Common wisdom has been that the loss — or
the taking — of the land began with the Great Mähele of 1846-1855,
and that it was quickly accomplished. This is only partly true. What the
Mähele did was to create, for the first time, land titles to kuleana
(homestead lots of the people) and to ahupua‘a (land districts of
the ali‘i).
In traditional Hawaiian society there was, strictly
speaking, no ownership of land. But before the Mähele, a large number
of land-use rights existed for all Hawaiians. With the conversion of traditional
land-use rights into private property, land became an alienable (able
to be taken or lost) commodity. This concept of land alienation and a
period of continued population decline proved disastrous for Hawaiians.
The primary lesson here is that a policy that
permitted land alienation of kuleana was anathema to continued Hawaiian
use of land. There were no land titles before the Mähele. It would
have been an easy thing to include a line in the new Mähele deeds
that said these homesteads could not be sold or otherwise alienated.
Such a policy is understood today internationally
as necessary to preserve native people’s lands. Compare Hawaiian
families here, who are often doubled up in homes or are homeless, with
Polynesian peoples in Samoa, Tonga, or elsewhere, where land is safeguarded.
Had alienation not been an option at the time of the Mähele, the
homesteads of Kahana and elsewhere in Hawai‘i would have been preserved.
Hawaiians would have remained ultimately in control of their homes.
But exactly how and when was the land lost? The
conventional wisdom has been that the people lost their kuleana rapidly
through ignorance of Western law and the sharp practices of haole. True
enough in some respects, but the loss was not rapid, and by looking in
detail at what happened in the land division of Kahana on O‘ahu,
we see a more complete picture.
Thus we find that though many ahupua‘a lands
of the ali‘i were rapidly lost, the people’s kuleana homesteads
awarded during the Mähele remained largely unalienated for a generation.
The fact that the people’s kuleana from
the Mähele added up to less than 1 percent of the land has often
been stressed (absentee landlords got more than 99 percent). Yet, the
people’s kuleana homesteads were fully developed and productive and
came with water rights through existing irrigation systems as well as
certain gathering rights outside the kuleana. Their aggregate value came
to about $2.7 billion in today’s dollars, or almost half of all the
land values at the time. In short, it was the people’s lands that
were the prize. How “the land” was taken is therefore really
the story of how these developed kuleana homesteads were lost.
The people were not naive victims. There was
instead a widespread intelligent resistance, often notable by the Hawaiianness
of its response.
While the kuleana were held onto, much of the
undeveloped lands were not. About a third of the undeveloped acres in
the islands went to absentee landlords who were high ali‘i. The Mähele
had cut off their traditional claim on the people’s labor, and so
these ali‘i often found themselves land rich and cash poor. With
Kahana, for example, the absentee ali‘i was one of the great winners
in the Mähele, with an awarded estate of
undeveloped lands worth perhaps $60 million in today’s dollars. Leasing
of this land might have brought in $1.5 million a year. But the absentee
ali‘i had a lifestyle that required a support of $14 million annually.
The solution was to operate with a negative cash flow, borrowing money
and putting up land as collateral. When no more loans could be gotten,
the mortgaged pieces of the estate were sold off until eventually the
family was left with almost nothing.
The Kahana portion of this estate was first mortgaged
in 1851 and was sold off in 1857. The buyers enjoyed a positive cash flow
from developing such lands and creating revenue, or by speculative profits
in buying and selling. Incidentally, counter to conventional wisdom, the
capitalist investor/speculators who scooped up these large undeveloped
land holdings were not all haole. Some, as was the case in Kahana, were
Päkë (Chinese).
Another third of the undeveloped lands went to
the king as an absentee landowner. He and his nephew who succeeded him
mortgaged or sold these lands, so that by 1865 all the remaining lands
in this huge estate were so heavily mortgaged that they were about to
be lost. The haole-dominated government then took these lands and set
aside a government allowance for the throne.
The final third of the undeveloped lands of Hawai‘i
were held by the government. Much of its most attractive land was sold
off to speculators or homesteaders by 1860.
Besides efforts to hold onto their highly valuable
developed kuleana, Hawaiian families also struggled to gain control of
some of these large undeveloped land divisions. This was best manifested
in the Hawaiian “Hui Movement” of the 1870s and onwards. A hui
was a native co-operative, established to buy and traditionally manage
ahupua‘a.
The Kahana Hui is a story of the lives of Hawaiian
men and women who had been born before private property existed in the
islands. The system gave each family exclusive use-rights for a house
lot and agricultural land, and an undivided use-right to the remainder
of the 5,000-acre Kahana land division and its offshore fishery. This
system was similar to traditional Hawaiian land-use rights and was an
attempt to provide an alternative to the Western market economy.
A reassessment is also warranted of the concept
of the monarchy’s government being “Hawaiian” during the
half-century prior to its fall. A series of government policies favored
land speculators over continued home ownership by the people. In the 50
years prior to its overthrow, the government had been largely dominated
by haole, with 94 percent of Supreme Court justices, 82 percent of the
extremely powerful Executive Cabinet members (who jointly played a role
similar to the office of president under the U.S. system), and a great
many of the legislative leaders were haole. A key 1874 law, uncovered
by this book, that eventually broke the backs of small Hawaiian landowners
was quietly introduced and then shepherded through the Legislature almost
exclusively by wealthy appointed legislators who were haole businesspeople.
Thus, in the end, questionable law lacking fundamental
fairness led to the taking of Hawaiian kuleana land. Following, in due
course, was the failing of the hui system, which was eventually all but
outlawed by the local courts. Hawaiians did not prevail, in Kahana or
elsewhere. They were brought down by population decline, the “right”
of land alienation, and a Western legal system biased against it.
The ahupua‘a, the large undeveloped land
divisions, had nearly all passed to non-Hawaiian ownership or control
prior to 1893. The Hui Movement had regained Hawaiian control of some
of these lands. In Kahana’s case the ahupua‘a had been lost
to Päkë in 1857; 20 years later it was returned to Hawaiian
control through purchase by the Kahana Hui made up of Kahana kuleana owners
and their allies. Then haole speculators — including such notable
names as Castle, Wilcox and McCandless — used sharp Western legal
practices (many of which would be illegal today) or purchases from a dwindling
number of Hawaiian heirs to acquire kuleana homesteads or hui shares.
Then came consolidations among these speculators, which resulted in a
single wealthy investor, Mary E. Foster, having near total ownership and
control of all of Kahana by 1920. Similar stories were played out across
the islands.
To answer how the land was taken is of great
importance in Hawai‘i. It explains the past, sheds important light
on the present, and helps set policy for the future.
The accepted wisdom has been that Hawaiians were
simple people, victims perhaps, but nothing more than “commoners”
who played no role in the events of the high and mighty.
Their names and lives, and the names and stories
of their lands, have not been forgotten. Indeed, it is their stories that
tell the story of the taking of the land and answer the question that
has plagued researchers for decades: how the land was lost, how the land
was taken.
interview
with Bob Stauffer
By Chad Blair
Occasional Weekly contributor Bob Stauffer
is a teacher and writer, and manages Alu Like’s Hawaiian Language
Legacy Program. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from UH-Mänoa
in 1990. Born and raised in Honolulu, Stauffer lives with his family in
Ka‘a‘awa, just around the corner from Kahana, the subject of
his new book. He knows his subject well, commenting that “over my
life, I’ve walked, hiked and camped within it and listened to its
voices on the wind.”
Can you summarize Kahana’s main points? Native land should be
inalienable — not for selling or losing. It’s that way for Native
Americans, for example. This is also why Tonga, Samoa and other Polynesian
islands still have pretty good housing records with native people, unlike
in Hawai‘i.
An indirect lesson from all of this is that if
the American-influenced government here had made Hawaiian homesteads —
kuleana — inalienable in the 19th century, these lands today could
have provided prime lands sufficient to house all Hawaiian families.
Who will be helped by reading Kahana? It’s of use to anyone
interested in understanding how Hawai‘i got to where it is today.
I’ve tried to present these issues in a readable fashion for an intelligent
lay person.
The Castle family figures prominently in the
acquiring of Hawaiian lands. They acquired a great deal of Kailua and
Käne‘ohe in those days, and they attempted to spread their land
holdings to include the 5,000 acres of Kahana. In a bruising fight with
Mary E. Foster, they ended up being bought out.
“Foster” as in Foster Botanical Gardens. Yes, that
was her city home and private garden. It used to be even bigger than it
is today; it went mauka into what is now the freeway. Her country estate
eventually was established over essentially all of Kahana.
Foster was one of the wealthier people in Hawai‘i.
Her sister was Victoria Ward, an equally very wealthy woman. The two,
incidentally, were strong supporters of the queen. Their father was a
British seaman and carpenter who started a boat-building and repair company.
I was surprised to learn of the Mormon ‘awa rebellion of 1874.
Kahana has a great many stories, and one of them discusses an episode
where a group of Hawaiians temporarily moved away from Lä‘ie
and established, with Kahana locals, a breakaway religious colony in Kahana.
They were later welcomed back into the church.
The oldest surviving Mormon chapel on O‘ahu
is still more or less standing in Kahana. There is a Mormon cemetery next
to it.
Describe Kahana Valley and Bay today. It’s a beautiful place
that residents and those of us in neighboring communities often don’t
talk about all that much, because the more we talk about it the more people
will come.
Kahana Bay has a beautiful half-moon sand beach,
shielded from the highway by a grove of ironwood trees. The remains of
a fishpond are there. With over 8 square miles of land in the valley,
there are magnificent trails, spectacular views and cultural sites. It’s
a remarkable place.
You envision a Hawaiian cultural park there. The book explains
how nearly all of the Hawaiian families that had lived in Kahana since
time immemorial lost their homes 100 years ago. Many of them were allowed
to continue in the valley on month-to-month leases.
When the valley was sold to the state of Hawai‘i
in 1970, the state decided to evict the 31 families still living there.
Following protests, the state ultimately agreed to give the families long-term
leases in return for them assisting the development of a living cultural
park in the valley.
It’s a long-term dream, but I see a low-key
interactive place for visiting school kids and others.
Is living Windward best? I would say so. Quite a bit of the pre-Cook
Native Hawaiian population on O‘ahu was concentrated on the Windward
Side. The Ko‘olau Loa district, from Ka‘a‘awa up to Kahuku,
is the classic part of the Windward Coast; very beautiful, green, cool
and spiritual. There is quite a bit of quietness and space.
Dangerous Beauty
Honolulu poet Morgan Blair paints riveting
real-life stories.
Mixed plate: New & Selected Poems
Morgan Blair
Wesleyan University Press, 2003;
200 pages, $18.95
By Lesa Griffith
Morgan Blair, aka Faye Kicknosway, uses the word
“dangerous” a lot — she sees peril everywhere. In the landscape
near Pohoiki, south of Hilo; in the returning of a manuscript to her (“I
will keep rewriting.”); and especially in poetry.
“It’s not an easy thing to be a poet.
You’re called upon always to see things differently, to understand
that everything is molecular and moving, that there is no one set structure.
It’s paying attention to the patterns and watching how they disintegrate
and reform.”
For the UH-Mänoa associate professor of
English and Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, everything is up for grabs
when it comes to subject matter, from a Walker Evans photograph (the inspiration
for her 1985 collection, Who Shall Know Them?) to a man watering
plants on his länai. She is especially drawn to the hard-luck, hard-living
hard-ups of the world.
Blair was shocked when Wesleyan University Press
approached her in 1996 about doing her latest book, Mixed Plate: New
& Selected Poems (2003; 200 pages, $18.95). “Because …
I’m full of gristle,” she says. “My subject mater is hardscrabble
kinds of people. I’m not interested in hiding things in a closet.
My characters have long toenails and big, sharp teeth. And I quite like
them.”
As she says herself, Blair is not an academic
poet. “My writing is not traditional,” which is why she gets
fan mail describing her work as “way cool.” On a package from
Wesleyan University Press, someone had written, “We, the student
helpers at WUP, love your poetry!”
Mixed Plate’s poems, more like tiny
novels, draw you in with immediate, visceral language and imagery. “Their
toothy gaze / on her flattened bodice, the tits now dugs, / and fallen
to either knee / where she keeps them strapped / with leather belts /
to hold their wag at minimum,” is as unflinchingly evocative as a
documentary film.
She can also turn toe jam and dirty clothes into
a love song: “You’re my briny feet / and my flat-nickel heart
/ and my pickled socks / and my slow-drag hands,” she writes in “Short
Take 6.”
With her pixie-short hair and vigorously gesturing
hands, 66-year-old Blair is as animated as a teenage tomboy. Yet her eloquent
words, punctuated by thoughtful pauses, have a gravitas that comes only
with real wisdom. And not many people whose bibliography fills more than
20 pages are so attentive to other people as Blair. She listens, without
interjection or impatience, with her whole self.
It’s not surprising to learn that what inspires
her most are her students.
“I have a big kids’ class right now,”
says Blair, referring to a graduate course, “and there are some talented
people who, with courage and belief in their imaginations, I think have
possibilities.”
Past students she has nurtured include writers
Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Justin Chin and filmmaker Ann Misawa.
Blair arrived in Honolulu “on a gig”
as a visiting distinguished writer at UH. (Then known as Faye Kicknosway,
her married name, she legally changed her moniker in 1993. She continues
to publish under her former name because “everybody wants her —
I built her too well.”) Blair had planned to be here for one semester.
Eighteen years later she is still here.
While she thinks Hawai‘i can be akin to
Circe’s island, lulling the unwitting into a functioning coma, she’s
secretly in love with her adopted home.
“When I leave the office, I can see the
skyline when all the lights are going on and that gold is all over the
sky. It’s so cleansing. The Big Island is so luminous, it has such
a sense of ‘I’m not going to be like this very long, I’m
changing under your feet at this very minute.’ You don’t get
that in other places. Going back to the Mainland, it’s like ‘Where
is this landscape still alive?’ ”
Local
Color
Bamboo Ridge collects plays by Tammy Haili‘opua
Baker, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Lee Cataluna and Alani Apio.
He Leo Hou: A New Voice
Bamboo Ridge, 2003;
265 pages, $15
By Jacquelyn Kim
Bamboo Ridge Press adds Hawaiian voices to its
Asian-dominated chorus with its latest publication, He Leo Hou: A New
Voice, a collection of four plays by Hawaiian playwrights due out
this month (2003; $15). All staged locally within the past 10 years, the
four plays by Tammy Haili‘opua Baker, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Lee
Cataluna and Alani Apio reveal the wide range of local drama, addressing
issues of land and water rights, political corruption, and the tension
between traditional and modern life — themes relevant to everyone
living in Hawai‘i.
Beneath the slapstick humor of Cataluna’s
Da Mayah seethes a scathing political commentary that resonates
more strongly today than it did when it was first performed at Kumu Kahua
in 1997. Lester, a linguistically challenged politician, likes to create
new positions for his cronies at the expense of important public projects
and takes his cues from Sandra, a bright but poorly paid assistant who
literally puts out the mayor’s fires for him. In a quintessential
Cataluna moment, the hit man Stanton tells Sandra, “You like one
dose Pepto Bismol after you eat too much pickled mango.” Clumsy and
poignant, Stanton’s bad poetry reflects the small town’s inadequate
appreciation for Sandra, for whom murder, corruption and sexual harassment
have become standard fare.
Cataluna, who like Sandra is “always trying
to keep it light and happy,” refrains from an overly dark ending,
which cynics may find unsatisfactory.
Also somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Baker’s Kupua,
Ka ‘Enuhe (The Caterpillar) tells the story of Kumuhea, who leaves
his wife every night to turn into a large caterpillar and ravage the sweet-potato
plants. This thinly veiled allegory of the story of an unfaithful lover,
told using minimal props and elaborate stage directions (incorporating
hula and break-dancing), proves to be a highly stylized revision of the
Hawaiian story.
The second story in Kupua similarly deals
with issues of sex and deception. In Ka Puhi a me Ka Loli (The
Eel and the Sea Cucumber), two young girls leave their father’s house
every night to satisfy their sexual appetites on the handsome shape-shifters,
the eel and the cucumber. Told through mildly graphic stage direction
and much sexual innuendo, the play takes an ambivalent stance on the daughter’s
sexual activity. In any case, the missionaries would not have approved.
Set several hundred years later, Kämau,
part one of Apio’s trilogy, relates the story of Alika, a Hawaiian
struggling with issues of land rights, family and Hawaiian identity in
contemporary Hawai‘i. When his boss’ company takes over his
homestead land, Alika must find a way to provide for his family without
selling out.
As a tour guide, Alika must pander to the Caucasian
tourists his cousin hates. Yet when one of the tourists, a maternal figure
echoing the voice of Alika’s deceased mother, says, “It’s
about aloha and sharing aloha,” Alika listens.
The loss of his family and land undermine Alika’s
masculinity. To make matters worse, when the native security guard finally
asks Alika to vacate his property, and Alika asks, “What makes you
Hawaiian?” the security guard belts out a powerful “‘O
ko‘u na‘au, ko‘u ‘ohana a me ka ‘ölelo Hawai‘i.
‘Ae, ‘ölelo au i ka ‘ölelo makuahine. A ‘o
‘oe?” (My guts, my family and the Hawaiian language. Yes, I
speak the mother tongue. What about you?).
Alika has no choice but to sulk away in shame.
Haunted by the voices of people in his life telling him what to do, he
must make a decision.
Touching on some of the same issues in Kämau,
Kneubuhl’s Ka Wai Ola addresses the tension between economic
development and preservation of natural resources, and the thorny topic
of native law enforcement ousting other natives from their land. Loosely
based on the 1990s legal battles over water, the play tells the story
of one family’s fight for their land’s water rights.
Originally performed for grade-schoolers by Honolulu
Theatre for Youth in 1988, Ka Wai Ola centers around Keanu, an
obstreperous youth embarrassed by his mother’s political activism.
Through a series of plays within plays enacted by his family, Keanu learns
the value of water in his native community.
As diverse as the pieces in He Leo Hou
are, it is important to note that these plays represent just a small sampling
of works being written by Hawaiians today. In his introduction, John H.
Y. Wat notes the many plays by Hawaiian writers produced at such venues
as Diamond Head Theatre, UH-Mänoa’s Kennedy Theatre and at UH
Hilo. He Leo Hou is a good introduction for those who missed the
live productions.
A must-have for teachers and followers of Hawai‘i
literature and politics, He Leo Hou opens up for discussion many
of the controversial issues absent from nonnative literature.
Human Beans
The story of Kona coffee is the story of the people who grew it
A Cup of Aloha: The Kona Coffee Epic
Gerald Y. Kinro
UH Press, 2003; 160 pages, $17.95
By Laurie Anne Agnese
It might be grandiose to call this slim volume
an “epic”; there is no one charismatic hero in its story, and
even at peak production Kona coffee has barely made a dent in the global
market. Yet Gerald Y. Kinro, a pesticide specialist with the Hawai‘i
State Department of Agriculture, percolates to the occasion and recounts
Kona’s social and economic history in A Cup of Aloha: The Kona
Coffee Epic (UH Press, 2003; 160 pages, $17.95). From the plant’s
adventures of a “roundabout route filled with luck, near misses,
legends,” to the many people who have toiled to produce it, Kona
coffee emerges as an apt subject of an epic.
Kinro is intimately acquainted with the famous
bean — he was born and raised on a coffee farm in Kona. Who better
to chronicle this heroic tale of how the various players struggled through
adversity to achieve independence and success?
Kinro deftly handles coffee’s pre-Kona history,
beginning in Ethiopia and following the caffeine crop through 10th-century
Arab cultivation and its rise as a global export from the Netherlands’
mid-17th-century colonies. The variety that eventually ended up in Kona
started in the French royal hothouses of Louis XIX and barely survived
the nationalistic journey to Martinique, only to have the French governor’s
wife give it illicitly (and romantically) to a Brazilian envoy.
Kamehameha I’s Brazilian physician was the
first to cultivate coffee in 1817 in Hawai‘i. But it wasn’t
until a second wave of commercial-cultivation attempts in the mid 1840s
— boosted by the Great Mähele and private land ownership —
that there was any profit. Then as now, coffee in Hawai‘i is subject
to global market whims and the crop’s pattern as an alternate-bearing
crop, which means that “a poor crop usually follows a good one.”
With the help of the University of Hawai‘i,
technical problems of coffee cultivation were remedied in the early 20th
century. From there the crop took off, grown largely on small-scale farms
run by Japanese immigrants. Kinro sentimentally captures the fate of these
farming families as they endure the adversity of insurmountable Depression-era
debt and World War II Japanese internment. The families banded together
to empower themselves and sustained the industry with cooperatives and
credit unions.
In the 1950s, quality-grading standards were
introduced, and by the ’70s coffee, like wine, was marketed according
to place — leading to today’s branding of the high-priced gourmet
beans.
A 1996 $15 million forfeiture scandal threatened
Kona coffee’s appeal worlwide. Between 1993-’96, Michael Norton
of the California-based distributor Kona Kai Farms bought Costa Rican
beans, mixed it with 25 percent Kona and sold it at 100 percent Kona premium
price. Norton did jail time and paid back taxes, but without an authenticating
system, Kona prices plummeted.
Fortunately, the bean made a quick recovery,
thanks to a Department of Agriculture certification process. The coffee
now goes for upwards of $35 per pound.
Oddly, Kinro says little about the finished product
itself. Kona coffee has a savory charm and warm radiance, providing the
smoothest buzz available from the legal end of stimulants. It is recognized
as a signature creation of the islands.
Kinro closes with a metaphor: Coffee yellowing
plants wilt from a dry day, but, despite appearing dehydrated beyond the
point of physiological repair, “the Kona coffee plants have never
crossed that line, no matter how bad the drought.” In his elevated
style, Kinro imagines Kona as coffee’s best destiny — its ideal
geographical features for cultivation and the aloha of the people to ride
the waves of its heroic history.
A
Peace of Maxine
Portrait of the artist as a mature woman
The Fifth book of Peace
Maxine Hong Kingston
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; 401 pages, $26
By Ryan Senaga
The Fifth Book of Peace, Maxine Hong Kingston’s
first novel-memoir in 14 years (and maybe her last), begins with the tragic
Oakland-Berkeley Hills fires of 1991. The tragic natural disaster claimed
24 lives and devastated many homes — including Kingston’s. The
former Hawai‘i resident and UH syllabus staple lost not only precious
family heirlooms, but also the 156-page manuscript of her novel-in-progress,
The Fourth Book of Peace.
To compound the tragedy, Kingston’s father
had recently passed away. On the first day of the inferno she and her
family had coincidentally just finished a burning ceremony in his honor.
A part of her believes that the fires were his reaction to improper offerings
at the service.
Broken into four parts — “Fire,”
“Paper,” “Water” and “Earth” (“Water”
being a recreation of the incinerated manuscript) — The Fifth
Book of Peace features the return of Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist
of Tripmaster Monkey. The novel follows him and his family on their
travels to Hawai‘i during the Vietnam War.
While Kingston’s latest may not become part
of the English Lit canon like Woman Warrior, it is a pleasure to
hear her memoir voice again. Only she can so effortlessly mix cultures
in a sentence without self-consciously calling attention to it.
In “Fire,” she examines the burnt rubble
that was her home: “We stood under the arch, under the bathtub, and
looked down at the footprint of the house. It looked like the low ruins
of pueblos and heiaus.”
Does she care to define “heiau” to
her readers? No, and more power to her for it. To borrow from Sarah McLachlan,
she excels in building a mystery.
Like certain pieces in her collection of jewelry,
Kingston’s control of and dexterity with pictures within words also
survived the fires: “Throughout the day, out of the camouflaging
ashes, emerged jade bracelets. One had turned black, two were shades of
brown and gray, and there was half a circle of white that looked like
tusk. … The jades were of various qualities; the fire burned at extremely
different temperatures from one spot to another. I put the whole circles,
warm, on my wrists. I shall wear them — fire jewelry.”
But it wasn’t easy to get back up to writing
speed. “After the fire, I could not re-enter fiction. Writing had
become a treat for my own personal self … for my own benefit. Retreat
into the Yin of mother darkness. Oh, the necessity and comfort of writing
‘I … I … I … I … I … ,’ the selfish
first-person author, narrator, protagonist, one. Freedom — to write
diarylike.”
One of Stephen King’s most absorbing recent
works documented his scribbling process and how it changed after his near-death
car accident. In a way, Kingston does the same here, essentially creating
a more substantial version of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s
Way.
“The garret where I wrote, which was just
my height, burned. A sign I do not want the aloneness of the writer’s
life. No more solitary. I need a community of like minds. The Book of
Peace, to be reconstructed, needs community.”
Sometimes the book reads like someone’s
journal and, even scarier, the journal of someone teaching writing workshops.
In Earth, as a form of healing for herself and others, she recounts helping
war veterans write their stories with an angle on peace. Although the
tales gain resonance because they occured before 9/11, this section is
a bit sugary and simplified.
The Fifth Book of Peace starts as a work
that documents loss and resurrects fiction, but transforms into a rare
examination of one author’s writing process. Perhaps it marks a seminal
transition in Kingston’s work: In interviews promoting this current
book, she has mentioned that she has lost the desire to continue writing
fiction.
Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston
By Li Wang
How did you cope with loss of your manuscript? I had this other
book out last year called To Be The Poet. It’s on becoming a poet
— turning a workhorse prose writer into a skylark.
I was about three-quarters of the way through
writing The Fifth Book of Peace and it was so hard. I mean, you’re
working for a dozen years on it, doing this long prose work. I just didn’t
want to be the responsible novelist anymore and I wanted to be a poet.
Poetry is easy. It is fast and short. And the muse either comes to you
or doesn’t.
I think of my whole life as a poet, starting
out when I was a kid, when I was chanting poetry in Chinese.
How did The Fifth Book of Peace emerge from the Fourth? The
title The Fifth Book of Peace comes from a Chinese myth that says once
there existed three books of peace that taught us how to end war, how
to make a peaceful world. And those books are lost in Chinese history.
When there is a new ruler they burn the books of the previous kingdom
and then they start all over again. They start civilization all over again.
And I think that’s where those books got lost.
Then I started to write a new one, thinking that
I was going to write a book of peace for our times. And that burned in
the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fires. That’s why I have The Fifth Book
of Peace. This is the one that has lasted.
Tell me about the section about Hawai‘i That section is called
“Water,” which .balances out the first section, which is about
fire — the fire fights, firestorms, battlefields. The water serves
as an antidote to the fire.
This “Water” section is actually a
rebirth of the book that burned in the fire. It continues the story of
Tripmaster Monkey’s Wittman Ah Sing as he leaves the Mainland for
Hawai‘i because he’s evading the draft. He’s coming to
Hawai‘i with his wife and child and he makes a life for himself on
the Windward Side of O‘ahu.
Who are you reading now? I just read Toni Morrison’s new book.
I love it. I love Love. Yes, she’s an influence. Another influence
— Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (Farewell to Manzanar) and Gail Tsukiyama
(Women of the Silk). Gail and I just gave a book party for Jeanne —
her new book, The Legend of Fire Horse Woman, is out now.
How did your 28-city book tour go? I went all over the U.S.
I was in Chicago when the Cubs were playing. Atlanta when the Braves were
playing. In New York when the Yankees were playing.
In Dallas, I’m reading from The Fifth Book
of Peace and I’m discussing peace and I’m expecting people to
argue and to support this war in Iraq. But they don’t. I hear people
say they want to bring the troops back. People were giving me standing
ovations for my peace message. That really surprises me. I thought I was
going to find opposition in Texas and the South.
Do you have anything to say to people in Hawai‘i reading your
latest? I’m looking at aloha and I’m thinking: Here is a
land and a culture, which believes in aloha. And I ask: Is aloha real?
Is it still there? Do people really have a way of communicating to one
another lovingly or is it gone? There’s been such a history of getting
rid of Hawaiian culture and language. I ask these questions in the book
and I think it’ll be interesting ... but I don’t want to give
it away. All I’ll say is that I’m able to observe Hawai‘i
again.
