Hula

by Jasmin Iolani Hakes

They turned her into a spectacle, a circus performer. She let them.

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.

we search for ways to end our poverty, our lack of jobs, the failure of our health.

Hawai`i is a story with dueling narrators, with multiple perspectives and paths.

Without roots, the tree falls over. Hi`i was going to dance hula.

Where she was stupid, the school would educate. Where she was wrong, the school would right. Where she was brown, the school would white.

From that day forward, whoever came to see the king would be met by hula. The crowd cheered and happy-cried. We would not get swallowed up by the tide. In hula, our heart would live on. Or so we thought.

(They learned the beginning verse of a hula too, and though we know you’re waiting for that verse, the mechanics that gave it life, you’re not going to get it. Our story is a hula, to honor and preserve in our ancestral fingerprint this place we love, not a hula how-to masquerading as a story.

The Bayonet Constitution annointed Thurston Hawai`i’s interior minister and stripped Kalākaua of his power and allowed foreigners to vote (foreigners meaning Americans and Europeans. Asians absolutely not. Does any other nation in the world allow noncitizens to vote in its elections? Asking for a friend).

The only remaining place where Hawaiians were still a majority was in the cemetery. We were a species on the brink of extinction.

Tony’s one redeeming quality was that he ignored Hi`i with a religious faithfulness, as if he might catch fire or turn to stone if he touched, looked at, or acknowledged

The noises that came from her mother’s room since he’d entered the picture were unsettling. He’d stolen the silence of their life and replaced it with rhythmic creaking and little cat meows. That, and a closed door that used to always be open.

Tony put too much shoyu in scrambled eggs and no brown sugar at all on the Spam before he fried it. He made breakfast taste nothing the way it was

She smiled at Tony, her tone artificially bright. She did that when Tony was around, fill the silence, as if she could create something that wasn’t there.

the car. He mumbled that it was stupid for Laka to reward her daughter for doing something she hadn’t wanted her to do in the first place.

I don’t like Tony.

It was only after months of Laka insisting they should carry more things from Hawai`i that she cleared a single shelf for Laka to prove her idea a good one. Laka filled her small section with the braided lauhala creations she spent hours making at home—bracelets and hats, fans and mats, baskets woven tight enough to hold water, strips as thin and fine as hair—but had to raise the prices when everyone chopped down their hala bushes to grow coffee.

In her skirts, no one would wonder if she was visiting from somewhere else. Her cousins might finally stop teasing her that she was an alien from outer space.

“I wanna be like her. Like you.”

She wanted to dance hula to show the kids down the beach that she was a part of their family. That she was Hawaiian. To prove she belonged.

:'(

Here you will not become a dancer. You will become a keeper of tradition, connected to the essence of Hawai`i. You will become a mirror that reflects the world around us.

“What you will learn here is an honor, a torch. Here you will malama honua, learn the ways, the language of our blood. You will be the caretakers of our land, our ocean, our culture and community. This knowledge, this `ike, is already inside you. It is your na`au. Here you will ask it to speak louder, and you will learn to listen.

Every year could be the last it will be this way, so we smoke and eat and drink, we dance and sing and be Hawaiian. We’ll do this until we can’t anymore.

When the waves brought the men with Bibles to save us from ourselves, these men pinned a scarlet letter on hula and called it immoral. Sinful. To appease them we cloaked our hula in heavy clothes, covered its skin, and erased mention of gods and goddesses. We tucked the ancient stories away where the Church couldn’t frown on them or cast them out.

How could Laka think she could bring her daughter home and then keep her from it? (We kept that part to ourselves; the girl’s eyes were wide as it was, history turning like a wheel in her mind.)

Laka had been his darling, but when she returned to Hilo, there’d been no contact, no attempt to see

Stretched between a daughter who refused to take that final step home and a wife too stubborn to open the door, his heart cracked right in half.

Laka didn’t seem to know really what to do with her now. It was as though she had never been a teenage girl.

She acted as if Hi`i were a guest, their connection fragile and something that could be dropped and shattered, someone she loved but didn’t a thousand percent know.

After that, he was no longer just Kainoa. Now he was Kainoa who made everyone laugh, Kainoa who pointed out star constellations, Kainoa who found bits of sea glass or heart-shaped rocks that he’d give to her when no one was looking. Up until now she hadn’t noticed how sweet he was, giving kids at the beach piggyback rides, and, unlike a lot of other boys in their grade, was completely unconcerned with being macho.

oooop some romanceeee

The halau had moved to a strip mall, which meant better bathrooms and a larger practice space, which everyone except Hi`i was happy about—the halau now shared a wall with the dojo where Kainoa did judo. Like some cruel joke, they had practice on the same days. Avoiding him only made her late. But at least on a day like today, one where they both had practice, she didn’t have to worry about trying to decline one of his invitations.

lil forced proximity moment

The sleepovers stopped immediately. Now they were strangers, and Hi`i was fine with that. Leilani acted like she was hot kaka.

Don’t like Leilani

Hi`i ignored Leilani watching from the hall and focused on her reflection in the mirror, acutely aware now of the un-Hawaiian green of her eyes, the un-ehu red of her hair. There were bigger problems than Leilani right now.

Hulali melted into a long narrow lizard, fourteen feet tall. When Laka ran to get closer to shore, the figure that had been her mother disappeared into the darkness of the water. Laka had raced home, buried herself in the blankets on her bed, and never followed her mother again.

“Girl, you haven’t been paying attention to wat I been trying fo’ teach you all dese years. If dea is one t’ing we Hawaiians don’t have, it’s time,” Hulali said.

Go Honolulu, I not going judge. But no talk to me ’bout my daughter’s birt’ certificate, no tell me wat you doing is fo’ da family. You care more ’bout blood quantum, ’bout getting approval from America. Am I Hawaiian because dey say so? Ma, if you believe dat den sorry, you fighting one losing battle. Pretty soon not going have any Hawaiians left if kanaka like you keep giving America da power

“If look haole and act haole, must be haole, yah? You know, wen I tole my dad I nevah like hang out wit chu he got all sad. Dat was wen I heard him later talking to e’rybody, dey was all saying how Aunty Laka was always taking care of dem wen dey was small, how aftah you it was like she wasn’t even part of da family anymore.”

The audiobook for the dialogue is so good

“Got everyt’ing to do wit chu. Your mom wen find you in one Dumpster. Dey say she brought chu back from Maui and told e’rybody you was her kid and stayed away from da family because nobody wen believe her.

What ????

Why you t’ink Tutu Hulali nevah come watch us dance? Cuz she shame. You made da whole family shame. Go back where you came from already, Haole Girl. Back where you belong.”

Omg

With the family she had, the reality of that was salt on a wound and suddenly all Hi`i wanted to talk to anyone about was being a Naupaka. She ignored any conversation that wasn’t about hula or being Hawaiian.

We understood, our world, too, was ruled and created by those to whom we paid tribute, our many gods and deities, our `aumakua and ancestors. Lowercase g versus uppercase G.

trust, he said, for the native Hawaiian people, the native people of Hawaii. Are those two things the same? Native. Being the place or environment in which a person was born or a thing came into being; inherent. Big N, little n. Of the blood; of the soil.

Hawaiian. Citizen of the United States is the first requirement. Trust in the trust. Hawaiian lands, land for home, Homelands. Reserved for the Hawaiian people to live as they always had.

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.

single full-blooded Hawaiian left. That’s a lot of blood lost. Not lost, gone.

Where did the king say a Hawaiian with fifty percent blood should be valued over one with forty-five, or twenty? Where did these numbers come from?

Pretty soon none of us will qualify to be ourselves. They’ll say there’s none left, and yet we’re all still here.

Why are they they, and we we? Who drew the lines? Who belongs to what, and what now belongs to who?

We’d gotten the courts to consider that Kaho`olawe might have cultural and religious significance to us, and put it on the American navy to conduct an environmental impact study, because haoles need experts to tell them that bombing an island with the full force of the American military does have an environmental impact).

Of all the keiki in all the `āina, fewer than fifty were `ōlelo. Fifty kids, speaking Hawaiian fluently. In total. We’d died, and now our language was dying too. Auwe.