Hula

by Jasmin Iolani Hakes

Hula is the language of the Heart. Therefore the Heartbeat of the Hawaiian People. King David Kalākaua

We are not what you think. To you who come on airplanes, who descend upon us, we are invisible as air. We are the `āina and the sum of its parts. Mauka and makai, past and present. Born of its waters, we are haumāna and kūpuna, ageless and ancient. The keepers of the stories, the watchers, the listeners. You think you’ve been here, you think you know us, you have the pictures to prove it. The pictures are wrong. You’ve seen nothing at all. We are not here for you. We were here before you came, and will be here when you leave. We are Hilo, one. We are we.

She shouldn’t have gone, shouldn’t have taken that job, cleaning up after those haoles who walked around the resort with towels draped across their shoulders like capes, Laka waking at dawn to rake the sand on the beach to protect their fragile feet, smiling when they took her picture without asking. They turned her into a spectacle, a circus performer.

Things happen. What breaks you won’t break us. We are made of glue. We hold things together.

They cut into our periphery as we dance and pray, sneaking into the corners of the pictures we take to prove we are here too—that we are not landscape, not shadows in a postcard. Between their honeymoons and bucket list vacations we steal moments for ourselves. It is the only space where we are allowed to exist.

This was a war between Hawai`i our home and Hawaii the destination. We were losing ground—literally and spiritually. We needed all hands on deck. If we weren’t diligent, if we didn’t all stand together, our Hawai`i would slip through our fingers like dry sand.

To protect a bay from a tidal wave, you build a breakwall. To protect a species, you put a kapu on killing it. But there is only one way to protect a place. You sit your `ōkole down and stay there. You stand guard. You learn from the kūpuna the old chants, the hulas from their memories, before those kūpuna are no more.

Learning hula was studying a new language and a new way of moving, but it was also learning about the `āina, about the environment and the relationship of the elements, about how to treat the planet and how to appreciate the forces at work. It was the study of mythology and anthropology, of ecology and botany, astronomy and zoology.

It was hand motions and facial movements, summoning fire from the belly and letting your heart beat through your feet. Hula was a way of seeing the world and accepting a role within it.

Hula wasn’t just something you did for a couple hours a week. You didn’t just take lessons. You became it. To be a real hula dancer, your skirts were always on, in one way or another.

The only way to protect our kingdom from foreign invasion is to keep living.

(The only thing more profitable than sugar was hotels. So they drained the entire district, those god-playing, disease-bringing haole, to erect their ka-ching factories.)

Today those haole, the all-powerful holders of the dictionary, say all that had once belonged to their God now belongs to the person holding the papers claiming ownership. This paper they created, they wrote.

Good ole America. They have all the colonial answers. Slave trade taught them so much. One percent African American might make a guy Black, but if they used the same ruler to measure American Indian, they’d be writing checks until their fingers bled.

One percent Black, you Black. One percent Hawaiian, nah, you nothing. When the U.S. government is making the rules, there is only one guaranteed winner.

By the year 2044, it’s said, there won’t be a single full-blooded Hawaiian left. That’s a lot of blood lost. Not lost, gone. If we were a seal or a whale, there’d be a worldwide effort to save our species. They wouldn’t be able to touch us. If we swam up to the beach they’d put cones around to protect us.

Land of aloha. Alo, to share. Ha, breath. Aloha, to share breath. How to share breath with those without breath?

America to the rescue, it says. Cue the superhero symphony music.

They’ll say there’s none left, and yet we’re all still here. In the time of our kings (and queen), we replaced the food we’d grown in our fields with sugar to feed America’s sweet tooth, sold it to them tax free. To thank us, they bound our mouths, our minds, then our hands and feet. Now we wait at the docks for the barges to fill the shelves of our supermarkets, to fill the needles fixed to our veins.

Basically, we needed to be in charge of ourselves before we went extinct. Who better to know how to fix this? Who better to care about us than us?

How could something that evokes such calm be so treacherous? Why are the most beautiful things in the natural world also the most lethal?

You could take a lighter to a root, but that didn’t make it any less part of the tree.

If we had had a community center, we could have closed the doors. We could have had our luau without invasion from the tourists who come without respect, without understanding. From those who come to take from this land rather than come to love it.

Back then, Beatriz said, being Portuguese meant you were European, so when you got to Hawai`i you were offered an acre of land and a better contract than any locals would ever be offered.

while the Hawaiian Islands were connected like siblings, they were not identical. Each had a rhythm, a heartbeat, unique to itself.