Putting feathers on our words: Kaona as a decolonial aesthetic practice in Hawaiian literature
544x376 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In this essay, I examine contemporary literary examples of “kaona connectivity,” the ways that kaona requires Hawaiians to connect with our kūpuna and with each other, as an affirmation of our aesthetic sovereignty. I begin by offering a reading of the kaona within Donovan Kūhiō Colleps’ “Kāhulu” to discuss kaona as an intellectual and aesthetic practice. I then discuss Hawaiian literary aesthetics and aesthetic sovereignty before giving close readings of contemporary literary works for their kaona. Specifically, I examine a short story by John Dominis Holt, as well as poems and art by Imaikalani Kalahele, who both employ kaona to connect Hawaiians with the Kumulipo, a genealogical chant tracing the last two monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to the beginning of the universe. I conclude with a discussion of the Kumulipo’s continued cultural, spiritual, and political significance and the power of Hawaiian aesthetic sovereignty.
The Mana of Kū: Indigenous Nationhood, Masculinity and Authority in Hawai‘i
A long time ago, the god Kū lived in Hawai‘i as a human. When a famine brought his family to the brink of starvation, he told his wife that he could save them only if he went on a journey from which he could not return. At first she refused but then finally consented when she heard the cries of their hungry children. Kū then stood on his head and disappeared into the earth. The woman’s tears watered that spot, and from it grew the ‘ulu (breadfruit) tree whose fruits saved all the people (Pukui with Green 1995: 8).
Methods of Memory: On Native American Storytelling.
In the summer of 1967 the alewives died, and they would gather in windrows on the beach, long lines of silver-sided fish corpses that thickened each day. I imagined that Lake Michigan spit them up from somewhere deep, as if in ecological distaste for a fish that didn't really belong, an invader that came from the sea up the St. Lawrence, a fish that New Englanders relished and Midwesterners scorned. Looking out at the water I could see their death march. Alewives slowly drifted in toward the beach side by side, their bodies bending with each passing wave, their blank eyeballs staring at the sky. The smell was awful, of course, but what was even more horrifying was the flies. They hovered in black clouds over the piles of stinking fish, and before long the piles began to move. The slow turning of the maggots wasn't detectable at first because the eye initially registered the silverstiff dead fish. But if you didn't turn away in disgust, if you stared for just a few moments longer, you could see the whole fish pile was alive with movement. And I remember this: