_The Value of Hawai`i_(Part Two), & other synchronicities

Just a few jottings, as we are preparing to host Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand & their daughter, Jessi, for a few days . . . yesterday, my English 100A class finished discussing Jill Yamasawa's documentary book of poems about McKinley High School, Aftermath. The book is notable for the way it links McKinley's military tradition to the school's current militarization (recruiters just off campus, needing to fill the maw of the Iraq/Afghanistan war machine), as well as the way it shows us the confusing and complicated lives of its students. It contains a photograph of Daniel K. Inouye, famous graduate of McKinley, and such a war hero that the Washington Post recently referred to him as more important the Hawai`i's history than Kamehameha, whose armies united the islands. I notice the article has changed title from "King of Hawai`i" to "Hawai`i's Reigning Son."

I went nearly straight from class to the second installment of the English department-sponsored teach-in's about The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, co-edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio. I blogged about the introductory segment here. This panel, composed of Kathy Ferguson, Davianna McGregor, and Ramsay Taum, focused on militarism, tourism, and sustainability in rural communities on the neighbor islands. And so Daniel K. Inouye re-entered the conversation. Oddly, having just told my class that Sen. Daniel Inouye, not Sen. Daniel Akaka, gets the bumpersticker "Dan," I heard Ferguson say the same thing. He's that important here.

Kathy Ferguson (who co-authored an essay with Phyllis Turnbull) talked about what will happen when he is no longer Senator Inouye, when his considerable power to bring us military pork, is gone. The military will leave Hawai`i eventually, was her point, and we need to prepare for that time. Evidence of the military's increasing disinterest in Hawai`i is the move of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, where Ferguson claims there is less organized resistance to the military presence. (Ask Craig Santos Perez about that.) Ferguson referred often to a book she had written on the military, asserting, with some irony, that it is "sacred ground." As Taum later pointed out, that was a pun. The military operates on Hawaiian sacred ground, even as it makes itself inaccessible to researchers like Ferguson, or to journalists. While tourism has its own UHM department and attracts the attention of many scholars and writers, the military controls its own information, as well as a great deal of land on these islands.

Davianna Pomaka`i McGregor talked about communities built upon subsistence farming, fishing and hunting: places on Moloka`i, rural Maui, and Lana`i that are overlooked by the state's powerful politicians on O`ahu. Among the projects she sees endangering the cultural kipuka she talked about is a wind turbine farm on Lana`i, which would be composed of 200 towers, each on the equivalent of a 40-storey building. These would block access to sea and mountain, among their other aesthetic problems. The power would, of course, all be sent to feed O`ahu's hungry maw.

Then it was Ramsay Remigius Mahealani Taum's turn. If everyone in Hawai`i carries their paradoxes on their sleeves, then his are long and especially fascinating. He graduated from Kamehameha, where he was a member of ROTC. He was admitted to West Point and the Air Force academy, opting for the latter. (Kamehameha was himself a military man, Taum noted.) He is also involved in the tourist industry. From there things get more interesting. What he does is to work with big companies coming in to do projects--companies like Disney. He confronts them with the need to talk to local communities (not just native Hawaiians, but Hawaiians who live in the area where the project is being developed). Even as he is well aware that they will eventually leave, he tells them they have a responsibility to the place once their debt is cleared or their profit is made. So he spoke as someone quite militant about the need to support Hawaiian culture, but he spoke in acronyms and puns (kaona!) that made him sound like a military man delivering a power point. The combination was, at first confusing, and then started to make sense in the way so many such joining of opposites begin to come into focus.

Later in the day, in the infamous Kuykendall 410 conference room, Adam Aitken read from his poetry. I tried to give a sense of Australian poetry--where it is, how it got there--but fear I mostly just talked a lot about Frank O'Hara, about whom Australians seem obsessively interested. Adam's own poems are conversational, place-oriented, like O'Hara's, often witty, but engage a very different field--his inheritance as the son of a white Australian father and a Thai mother, his travels in Malaysia and Cambodia, his clear fascination with languages and film. Once his guard was down a bit, Adam's wit came through. "I wrote a poem for the King of Thailand," he announced at one point, as if it were the usual thing. And then there were the difficulties of translating one poem into Malay, where there is only one word for insect. How to translate a line that distinguishes between an insect and a "bug"? "This was not an insect; it was an insect."


Ah, language. Buy Adam's latest book here.

Better yet, seek him out. (He's on facebook.) The out of Australia book prices are very high, but I know he has some with him.

Jill Yamasawa's _Aftermath_

Jill Yamasawa's Aftermath (Kahuaomanoa Press, forthcoming 2009)

In preparing to teach a course in poetry & politics this Spring (beginning in a week!), I've been reading books about public uses of poetry (Joan Shelley Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America) and about the suppression of leftist poetry (John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left and Cary Nelson's revolutionary memory). Rubin's book explains the significance not only of historical memory but also the early 20th century practice of memorizing and performing verse in school. This reading helps me better understand my father's many recitations of “Snowbound” as well as my mother's obsession with “Invictus." According to Rubin, poetry played a crucial role in creating a public vocabulary with which to bind friendships and discuss ethical issues. But it's Lowney who helps me get where I want to go in my thoughts on Jill Yamasawa's forthcoming book, Aftermath, which is the biography of a place, McKinley High School, in Honolulu. Like so many places in Hawai`i, McKinley High School is only the most recent building, name, ideological construction for what have been other names, other uses, other cultural values. While Lowney notes that “the problem of memory is, of course, fundamental to modernity and constitutive of literary modernism” (4), poets in Hawai`i know this as a problem closer to home. At home. The problem of memory is inscribed in the names used to mark places in Hawai`i. To the winner go the names. What is now called Ford Island (at Pearl Harbor) was Moku `ume `ume, Chinaman's Hat was Mokoli`i, Diamond Head was Leahi, and so on. (In recent years, however, these names are often used in tandem, or as political and cultural choices.) McKinley High School was built in Kewalo. Yamasawa quotes the “Dictionary of Hawaiian Localities” from 1883:

A fishpond and surrounding land
on the plains below King Street,
and beyond Koula.

Kewalo contained a spring called “Drowning waters,” after a spring used by priests for human sacrifice. As we find out some pages later, Kakaako / Kewalo “was a place of recreation” where Kamehameha had a residence, “along with his family, and personal kahuna.” That the militarization of Hawai`i, the thirst of the military for young soldiers from local high schools, is linked to this is clear in Yamasawa's sequence, although the sacrifices have a very different meaning or provenance. And therein lies much of her tale. It is a story of empires (McKinley's and Bush's, by way of the Vietnam War), as much as a story of the young people who participate in it, either as its victims or perpetrators, often as both (children of immigrants from colonized places who become soldiers in the American army). It is a tale of institutions attempting to organize multiple pasts into one, and it is equally the tale of challenges to those institutions.

Yamasawa builds her project on an axis. On the synchronic line is the study of mathematics; Yamasawa's narrator, Shirley, is a math teacher at McKinley High School, where she works with special ed students. Math, as we know (even if we sometimes suspect otherwise) makes sense, provides an abstract logical view of the world. The other, diachronic, line represents history. This is where logic and sense threaten at every turn to collapse, whether because a student has no family to record on his family tree project, or because McKinley High School itself is a colonial implant on the `aina. While the sections of her book are titled with reassuring words like “slope,” “variables,” “equations,” and where even “inequalities” takes on a neutral cast, what falls into these categories is less easily organized. While Shirley can teach math, it is clear that most of what is to be learned (via Shirley) is about Hawai`i's social and economic inequalities, its fraught linguistic history, its various amnesias (including those of the present about the present). There are moments in the text where these axes come together violently, as in “A Long Walk of Thresholds”:

There's an Original Sin
that taints our country. The radicals wrote
men and women are created equal.

The historical radicals—before McKinley—set down an ideal line that could not bear the press of American history.

Words, too, exist on this axis. Take the name “Pele,” as one example. In her poem, “Madame Pele,” Yamasawa offers up the many meanings of the words “Madame” and “Pele,” including the Brazilian soccer player, Pele. In Hawai`i we know Pele as the volcano goddess, a spiritual life force. But the astounding turn in Yamasawa's poem comes here:

I mean the bomber so named before its presentation
to the Air Force by McKinley High School students after
a successful bond drive to cover the cost.

This would be during the Second World War, Pele's name appropriated by the military for a very different kind of firepower. Yamasawa draws attention to other words, as well, from “Homeland Security,” “Mission Accomplished,” and many others. She uses several forms of English, standard, non-standard (including Pidgin and the immigrants' accented English), as well as Hawaiian words that bring with them large cultural concepts. Yet one among the many ironies about McKinley High School was its status as a non-standard English school, meaning its students spoke Pidgin, not what some still refer to as "proper English." The split between standard and non-standard schools in Hawai`i lasted many decades. See Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue for a personal/political history of Pidgin.

Jill Yamasawa's documentary poetry reflects the poet/teacher's capacity to empathize with her students (if you know Jill, she's hard to separate from Shirley), caught up in domestic dramas that are also national in scope. Nowhere in the book are we permitted to forget the Iraq War or the military recruiters settled just off-campus. Empathy is an ethical act; the reader is not permitted ever to forget that the words she uses for place or politics are pre-selected for her. Yamasawa has performed the discipline of research, peeled back the layers of history and language, re-membered for us the meaning of the many sites that are McKinley High School, as well as the students shaped by it.

Yamasawa's book will be published later this Spring. In the meantime, sections are available in Tinfish 18.5: The Book.