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Author/activist/teacher Haunani-Kay Trask. Photo by Brian Kluepfel.
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Trask Still Beats the Drum of Resistance
By Brian Kluepfel
Special to AsianWeek
After three decades dedicated to Hawaiian sovereignty and indigenous rights, author/activist/teacher Haunani-Kay Trask has the same message for foreign interests who wish to use her people’s islands: Get out. In a political climate that she admits is less accepting of this message than ever before, the professor of Hawaiian studies is unrepentant in delivering it.
Appearing at Eastwind Bookstore in Berkeley on Aug. 17, Trask read from Night is a Sharkskin Drum, her latest book of poetry (University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). Mixing rich, natural imagery with Hawaiian-language words and phrases, her work conveys the inseparable bond between Hawaiians and their lands. She commented, “Poetry is the first thing that I love.”
Using this passion for words (her first poetry collection, Light in the Crevice Never Seen, appeared in 1994), she mourns the millennia-old culture that has been torn apart by the twin-headed Hydra of tourism and military occupation. Reminding her audience that many Hawaiian tourists come from California, she read of “long-forgotten ali’i (chiefs)/entombed beneath grandiose hotels.” A couplet in “Tourist” evoked “the flourishing hand of greed/glittering knives of money murdering the trees.”
Tourists outnumber native Hawaiians 35 to 1, and Trask said the indigenous see only the crumbs of the billion-dollar business. In “Dispossessions of Empire” she talks of “Rich Americans/tanning with the stench of empire/empire degrades through monetary exchange/nothing amiss in the morass of Paradise.” She has equal venom for Japanese tourists, writing in “At Punalu’u” of “the slant of their lens/diminishing Hawaiians.”
In response to the military presence in the islands, Trask was among University of Hawai’i faculty who recently organized as Professors Opposed to War. Her poem “V-J Day” mocks “the commander-in-chief/ascending on bursts of rhetoric” and also throws a few pointed barbs at long-time Hawaiian Senator (and World War II veteran) Daniel Inouye.
Trask made a transition to some earthier, sexy poetry by reading from the third part of the collection. “Chants of Dawn” is less of an attack on the haole than a celebration of Hawai’i’s beauty. “We Hawaiians always see things through metaphor. When I see nature all I see is thousands of gods making love in two hundred positions,” she said.
In “Sweeten the Mango,” she shars her belief that the decaying fruit “is the sexiest smell you can imagine.”
Trask dedicated her first poetry book to many legendary jazz musicians and talked about their effect on her. “I don’t think I would have made it without Ben Webster,” she said. “He has a sorrow that reminds me so much of Hawaiians. It is so deep and so companionable. He takes me through the sorrow, and I come out the other side ... that’s my catharsis.”
More recent musical forms have captivated her, as well. The 52-year-old professor admitted that she was “honored to death” to have a Hawaiian rap group turn one of her speeches into song. “In Hawaiian, it’s hard to rap, because you have to pronounce every syllable,” she laughed.
She was optimistic about the renaissance of the Hawaiian language, which was banned by the American government in 1896 and not restored legally until 1978. She does not write any poetry entirely in Hawaiian but freely samples from the multilayered vocabulary, and her books have a glossary to enhance the reader’s experience.
“Languages are absolutely critical in carrying the culture,” she said. “Almost all my students are in some stage of linguistic decolonization, and they’re very proud of it. They love to be places where there are no Hawaiians and burst into the language, so that no one can understand them. Whereas my mom’s generation was embarrassed to speak Hawaiian.”
And while she uses her poetry occasionally to amuse or titillate, for the most part Haunani-Kay Trask believes in the “art as an anvil” concept, each word a dagger aimed at the empire she feels has marginalized and trivialized her people. To paraphrase the title of her recent interactive CD-ROM, Trask is not a happy native.
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