Sharks in the Time of Saviors

by Kawai Strong Washburn

Fire goddess Pele with her unyielding strength, birthing the land again and again in lava, exhaling her sulfur breath across the sky. Kamapua‘a, wanting her love, bringing his rain and stampede of pig hooves to break her lava down, make it into fertile soil, the way it is all across the grassy hills of Waimea, down into the valleys, surrounding where you were born. Or there is Kū, god of war, who one day plunged himself into that same soil, turning from a father and a husband into a tree, a tree to bear fruit for his starving wife and children. The first breadfruit. He was a god of war, but he was also a god of life. Sometimes he came as a shark …

How many nights did we make like that? How long was I stupid enough to believe we were indestructible? But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of stars outside a window at twilight.

If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can’t avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and pasts that become gods and nightmares that do, as well. As I age I learn that there are more gods than I’ll ever know, and yet I have to watch for all of them, or else they can use me or I can lose them without even realizing it.

Take money: my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, Kānaka Maoli that she was, had no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth, a sense of one’s place in the system. What was provided and what had to be cultivated. But ships from far ports carried a new god in their bellies, a god who blew a breath of weeping blisters and fevers that torched whole generations, a god whose fingers were shaped like rifles and whose voice sounded like treaties waiting to be broken. And money was the name of that god, and it was the sort of god that preyed on you, made demands and laid its hands on you with such force as to make the Old Testament piss its pants. We were made, eventually, to pray to it, whether we wanted to or not. Your father and I still pray to it now.

Take language. ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was not written, only passed from one mouth to the next, less letters than the English that soon roared over it, and yet it contained more mana of Hawai‘i than anything that foreign tongue could twist itself into. What do you do when pono, a healing word, a power word—a word that is emotions and relationships and objects and the past and the present and the future, a thousand prayers all at once, worth eighty-three of the words from the English (righteousness, morality, prosperity, excellence, assets, carefulness, resources, fortune, necessity, h...

“I never thought I’d be the type of person who would do that to someone,” I say. “Now it’s exactly what I am. Forever.”

Mom nods. “It’s always like that.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “Whenever I’ve made a choice in my life, a real choice…” She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. “I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.” It’s exactly what I think. So there’s nothing to say. I saw at my nose with my forearm. Palm more tears from my eyes. “I’m always losing better versions of myself,” she says. “I don’t know. You just have to keep trying.”