_The Value of Hawai`i_ 3: a guest post by Lyz Soto

As I ran out to drive Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff to the airport yesterday, I suggested to Lyz Soto, a Ph.D. student in our department, whose book Eulogies was published by Tinfish Press, that she guest blog the Value of Hawai`i event at high noon. Here is her post [to the left, you can see her at the right with fellow grad student, Danielle Seid]. Here goes Lyz:

The third installment of the Teach-In sessions for The Value of Hawai`i focused on issues troubling government, law and the courts, public education, University of Hawai`i, and prisons in the Hawaiian Islands. The speakers were Chad Blair (government), Mari Matsuda (public education), Neal Milner (University of Hawai`i), Kat Brady (prisons), Meda Chesney-Lind (prisons), and Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie (law and courts). As with the last two sessions, Kuykendall, room 410, was packed to standing room only with an audience that actually listened to what the panel had to say on their subjects of expertise.

What did I get from this talk?

Each speaker was thoughtful and passionate about their topic. The Value of Hawai`i, and organized events surrounding its publishing, is not a casual event for any of these people. They are participating in this dialogue because they want to activate and see real and substantial change in our community.

My first reaction to their analysis was to feel discouraged. The status quo that they outlined has been in place for most of my life. If anything, circumstances appear to have worsened in my lifetime. No one wants to hear that, especially when it is acknowledged that most of the people in current positions of power appear to have no real desire to effect change, or at the very least a renovation of the status quo.

My second reaction was hope, triggered, bizarrely, by Kat Brady’s and Meda Chesney-Linds’ analysis of the prison system in Hawai`i. Do not get me wrong; the picture they painted was far from rose-tinted, and it touched upon the fallout of the continuing drug problem in our community, without really wrestling with it as an active component in our state’s social problems, however, time was severely limited, and their focus was the problems of the criminal system and the role incarceration is playing in Hawai`i.

The brought up Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which is a for-profit company that, in the words supplied by the company website, provides “…the design, construction, expansion and management of prisons, jails and detention facilities, as well as inmate transportation services…” The community of Hawai`i has experience with this corporation, because a number of people incarcerated in our state have been moved to CCA prisons on the continent. All involved in that decision, apparently, said that “housing” Hawai`i people in continental prisons was cheaper than keeping them at home. Please go to the Corrections Corporation of America’s website! The same language used on that site could be applied to building sewer lines. They focus on "innovation, cost effectiveness, and efficiency." I would not have guessed that this company deals exclusively in the imprisonment of people, were it not for a single paragraph that is one sentence long, in a company description that goes one for six paragraphs. Apparently, they do provide rehabilitation and education programs, but these receive far less emphasis than the fact that CCA has been mentioned in Forbes magazine as one of “America’s Best Biggest Companies”. I digress…

The hopeful reaction! This moment came when Kat Brady and Meda Chesney-Linds pointed out that there is money in the system that can be shifted to fund productive educational programs. Now back to the bad news; it is currently directed at prisons, and incarceration in Hawai`i is a growth industry. This brings me back to the language used on CCA’s website, “[the]… expansion and management of prisons…”. The predicted and desired growth of an incarcerated population is built into this company’s vocabulary, which leads me to an interesting point made by Laura Lyons during the question answer period of the session. She said that it was important to acknowledge the difference between privatization, which is the word most of us use to describe the shifting of programing from government to private sectors, and corporatization, which is a word that more accurately describes what is happening in the American prison system. CCA proudly defines itself as a for-profit corporation, thus by its very nature it will do well to place fiscal interests above the interests of the people it contains. There is nothing private about responding to the will of shareholders.

Chesney-Lind and Brady stated that the economic benefits of a state like Hawai`i using CCA’s services are fictional. It is not cheaper to send Hawai`i prisoners to continental facilities. This begs the question:

Why is the corporatization of this system so appealing to our government officials? If there is no economic benefit, where is the advantage, and perhaps more importantly, who is benefiting from these choices?

All of our mainstream economic models, including those that apply to education, health care, prisons, and government, are built on the incongruous idea that expansion and sustainability are actually synonymous, and that success must lead to more. More of what is not always clear, I have not even touched education, and I could go on for another fifty pages, so I will close with this thought; most of the machinations (I mean this in the best possible way) we employ in trying to effect change involve some element of force, and perhaps this is inevitable in a dialogue that involves people, but I like to hope there are other options. The words creative and imagination were mentioned more than once, and I think the ideas behind these words must be key components of how we approach a bureaucracy supported and sustained by systems of self-protection. If we relegate ourselves to a counter-culture reaction that promotes protest as the main, and sometimes only, catalyst to make a difference, we can never hope to transform or even modify present structures,. We must be the difference, not just in our conversations, but in how we conduct our daily lives.

Here's a longer bio of Lyz: Lyz Soto is a Ph.D. student with an emphasis on creative writing. She is also the Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawai`i, a non-profit organization dedicated to mentoring youth in the art of Spoken Word. She has worked in construction and archaeology, and received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.Phil. in Archaeological Heritage and Museums from Cambridge University. Lyz is a performance poet, who enjoys working cross-genre in multiple media fields. Her book, Eulogies, was recently published by TinFish Press.

Tinfish editor added links.

_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.

Confrontations / Coalitions: The Value of Hawai`i Part One

Kuykendall 410, the room where English department faculty go to hear and deliver colloquia, like other rooms in the building, is confining. As Mari Matsuda said yesterday, you can't see the mountains (behind the back wall) and you can't feel the trade winds. It signifies public education as a proto-industrial activity, divorced from place or local purpose. This room, large and cold and capable of "holding" dozens of people, was the stage for two events in my professional life this week, events that signify to me where we are (actually, conceptually, metaphysically!) as writers and residents of this state.

On Tuesday evening, Adam Aitken's and my Foundations of Creative Writing course met in 410 to discuss readings that can be found in this previous blog post and on-line. The readings include a take-down of W.S. Merwin for rewriting Pi`ilani's narrative of the life of her husband, Ko`olau (also made internationally famous by Jack London, but that's another story, indeed); a back and forth between Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui and Dennis Kawaharada about whether or not his work (the publication of Hawaiian mo`olelo in English in books and on-line) amounts to an appropriation of Hawaiian culture; and an essay by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright that argues (in part) against the Asian Settler Colonialism paradigm set forth in a book by that name co-edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura. The readings were intended to provoke, but I envisioned the conversation as one between friends (the students are fond of one another), where we poked at sore spots, but then worked our way toward a place where we as creative writers can all be active, productive.

Needless to say, perhaps, the class did not work to plan, although it did prove productive. A palpable tension filled the air-conditioned room. I began by suggesting that there's something Platonic about considerations of literature in Hawai`i, that more emphasis is put on "truth" than on imagination. Many of our literary controversies have entailed arguments over the truths of representations (of Filipinos, Hawaiians) or language (did you get your Pidgin right, your Hawaiian?).

We had opinions across the spectrum, from "anything goes" to "what can I write about here, when everything seems sealed off culturally?" We talked about the act of framing; if you say you don't know exactly what you're talking about, one student surmised, you can forge ahead. If you let people know you are writing what you hear, then you can get languages wrong, another posited. On the other side, there was suspicion of the audience, the readers who may know nothing about Hawai`i. One woman said she had taught someone in NYC a phrase in Hawaiian, which she worries she butchered, and is scared that the woman might consider her to have been "authentic" in some way. Another student talked about being but not appearing Hawaiian, growing up immersed in pop culture, and experiencing the sting of being told she wasn't "Hawaiian enough." And then a white male student erupted into an angry confusing diatribe about being called an "f-ing haole" and how the local community does not spend all its time thinking about these academic issues. He walked out.

On a personal level, I was left feeling that the students did not trust me or each other, that the conversation had been warped by fears of saying something that would be judged ill by someone else in class, or reported on to others outside of class. There was a sense that most of what was most valuable to say didn't touch the air-conditioned air. But Adam spoke eloquently about migration and his own experience as a mixed race person in Australia who has circulated around the globe for love and work. And I launched into my notion of "positive critique." If something is missing in the literary community here, fill it in. Write it. Publish it. Make alliances with other people who live here over the big issues, like the economy, like tourism, like militarism.

The class ended. I got some impassioned emails and much silence. I hear through the grapevine that some students didn't want to have the conversation at all; others worry that they didn't explain themselves well enough. And so the conversation will go on, mostly internally in ways that can be destructive, but one hopes can branch out, move, form, not get stuck. Stuck is a place that Hawai`i, or at least academic Hawai`i, lives in too much of the time.

Fast forward to Thursday at noon. The first of several panel discussions of The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, and published by the University of Hawai`i Press. A large audience showed up from all over campus and the local community. We sat facing the windows that run only at the top of the room, so all you see are some clouds, if you're lucky. We sat facing Jon Osorio, Carlos Andrade (and their guitars), Tom Coffman, and Craig Howes. It was one of the few days I didn't have my camera with me, so it will need to be an imagined past for my readers. The event was advertised as an overview; the more focused discussions--of the military, tourism, education--will follow in coming weeks.

In somewhat backwards chronology, Osorio led us through the 1970s in Hawai`i, when the Hawaiian sovereignty movement became strong. No one could have imagined how strong it would become, he said, nor how many small movements it would inspire: the Protect Kaho`olawe Ohana, the Waiahole/Waikane protests, which led to the state mandating against development in that area (very near where I live), and so on. Many of these movements were peopled by the poor, the uneducated, but they spoke truth to power. Coffman then filled in the backstory of the 1960s, just after statehood, when Hawai`i took off economically, when multi-ethnic Hawai`i was a model for the rest of the country. Howes spoke of the near-universal health care coverage Hawai`i had as recently as the mid-80s and early-90s. Andrade sang a mele he wrote about Hā`ena on Kaua`i, where real estate and property tax prices are driving Hawaiians off their land. Julia Roberts, it seems, is a heavy in this discussion, as she paid $15 for a piece of property.

What impressed me most was the way that Osorio, in particular, spoke of Hawai`i as a place where we live, a place we need to protect. While he aims to work toward an independent Hawai`i (a goal toward which I have yet to figure out my own feelings and thoughts), he also means to do so un-exclusively, by figuring a community of like-minded (rather than racially-marked) citizens. As he writes in his essay from the book, restoring the Hawaiian Kingdom has garnered support over the past decade "because it does not lead to the destruction of relationships among friends and families because of race" (18).

Without in any way thinking this was a panacea for what ails us, I left the room feeling lighter, more optimistic than I have in years about how we all live and think about our lives here. I felt at home, and that's a place I want to be.

As a digression that is not one: Carlos Andrade talked about the need for self-sufficiency in growing food and trying to avoid consuming resources. I'm proud to say that my husband, Bryant Webster Schultz, has taken upon himself the project of easing us, to whatever small extent we can, off the grid.


He abandoned the dryer months ago, and hangs our clothes outside. He bought solar panels, so that our living room lights in the evening run off solar. He got us a rain barrel, so we can water our plants without using the tap. And he's now built a garden box, with plans for more on the bottom lanai, along with a second rain barrel. To a large extent this is all symbolic. We still drive too much--to Sangha's school, to my workplace, to Radhika's soccer games in Waipahu--but we are at least experimenting with the notion that we do not need to spend the world's resources at so quick a rate.




In future, I'd like to blog about the effects of this fresh paradigm of Hawai`i on the literature of Hawai`i. What does this mean for our notions of form? Practice? Publishing? Content (something we who teach CW think too little about with our students, I fear). Until then . . .

[Editor's note, 10/2/10: At this morning's soccer game, I talked to Chris Cummins (about whom a bit more at the end of this post), who remarked on the irony that the self-sufficiency I describe at the end of the post depends on privilege--space in which to grow things, put up solar panels, and the money to do it. The guy in a tent in the park can't grow his own food, Chris pointed out. Nor can he, in his small apartment, which he compared to the windowless hole of Kuykendall 410, remembered vividly from his student days. He also talked again about the "many directions" Hawaiians can go with the issues raised earlier in this post, legally, culturally, politically. Complication is the coin of the realm.]