To find out more about this book, and/or to order it,
click here.
Susan
M. Schultz, Introduction:
Jack
London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some prose) of Hawai`i
In Honolulu's
multi-ethnic community, he was constantly reminded of his dearth of
roots, his nonexistent heritage of homeland, customs, music, food and
language. Part of a wandering family, he has no geographical place to
call home. No sweetly remembered visions of hills, woods or country
roads to revisit; no proud ancestral plot of land passed down through
generations. Only a paltry handful of relatives, scattered across the
states, for whom reunion is unthinkable because there was never any
union to being with.
--John Wythe
White, “Surf Cities”
FAQs (before the
fact):
What are
Hawai`i's demographics?
Caucasians
are a numerical minority in Hawai`i. According to the 2000 census,
Hawai`i's population is 24.3% white, 41.6% Asian, 9.4 native Hawaiian
or Pacific Islander, and 21.4 % two or more races. That's when you
organize your statistics under “one race.” Other means of
organization yield different results, elevating the percentages of
all of these groups. These are not the only groups, just the most
numerous. The white population is a minority among minorities,
although whites, along with local Asians (with the exception of
Filipinos) tend to be well-educated and to wield political and
economic power in excess of their numbers.
Why do you employ
the term Euro-American, which no one in Hawai`i actually uses?
Euro-American seems a good
umbrella term for the different categories of whiteness in Hawai`i.
Kama`aina are writers
whose families have lived here for generations. Local Haole
include writers who grew up
here, speak Pidgin, know the local culture and references. White
or Caucasian writers would be
those who came to live here, at least for a time, although they're
also referred to locally as haole.
Crucially, Euro-American is a term that does not detach whiteness
from culture. If I am German and Irish (as I am), I carry aspects of
those cultures and attitudes with me, whether or not I can directly
identify them. I also participate in the dominant American culture,
one that is often seen as bankrupt but whose influence is pervasive.
(In what follows, I do tend to fall back on the term “white poet,”
if only because it's shorter than Euro-American poet.”) As a poet
educated on the east coast, I participate in a tradition of
Euro-American poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through
Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian, a tradition that
grafts itself uneasily—but surprisingly—to the traditions I have
encountered and learned about in Hawai`i.
Why title the
book Jack London is Dead?
The
title is an homage to Jessica Hagedorn's Charlie Chan is
Dead anthology of Asian American
writing. Just as Charlie Chan, with his broken English and his
Swedish actor's face, has been a problematic figure for Asian
American writers, so Jack London is a writer whose work about Hawai`i
is deeply problematic to native Hawaiians and others. The writers in
this anthology work hard not to appropriate the stories of this place
and its inhabitants. Euro-American poets in Hawai`i have their own
material to work from, all of it vexing. [Jack London represents the old canon of Hawai`i writing; the poets in this volume represent a generation of writers who have experienced the necessary reaction against that canonization.]
What is it like
to be a Haole?
Haole is
the local term for “white” or “Caucasian.” Originally it
meant “without breath” and “foreigner”; even as its meaning
can be neutral (“that haole guy who sits in the back”), the harsh
echoes of its original meaning co-exist with the neutrality of its
present. “Haole” can also be used as an insult, to mean someone
who is overbearing, who acts entitled, whose ear is deaf to local and
Hawaiian cultures. At worst, “haole” is the word that comes after
“f*cking.” Interestingly, one of the best descriptions and
investigations of Haoleness is by an Asian American writer, Keiko
Ohnuma, in “Local Haole—A
Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and raised
in Hawai`i.” In this 10-year old essay, Ohnuma writes: “White has
never been invisible or normative in Hawai`i. It was superior,
dominant, and then it was overthrown. It is this overthrow—at first
social, then political and cultural—usually not expressed as such,
that represents not only a resistance to colonization and external
forces, but that has been full incorporated into the hegemonic”
(274). She uses the word “overthrow,” which resounds with the
overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. The resonances are
probably too strong, but her argument that white culture was later
marginalized is right on. The word “haole,” too, connotes more
than anyone outside Hawai`i would know: “For while a Caucasian
appearance might open the doors to jobs or privilege, “haole”
as an identity is not the same as white. Whiteness is not a culture;
it is a position the local haole does not know how to take. And
localism is a position they are still not allowed to take” (283).
Local whites, in other words, are neither here nor there, neither
local nor unmarked. In her more recent work, Haoles in
Hawai`i, Judy Rohrer notes that
“whiteness in Hawai`i is always marked and often challenged” (2).
Rohrer is a white woman whose family moved to Kauai when she was
seven; she grew up haole. She takes her cue from Ruth Frankenberg's
White Woman, Race Matters:”White
women need to become conscious of the histories and specificities of
our cultural positions, and of the political economic, and creative
fusions that form all cultures.” This is not, Frankenberg
continues, in order to reinforce the too-simple dualisms or to
“valorize whiteness.” Instead, she calls for a need “to develop
a clearer sense of where
and who we are”
(1993, 204).
Where and who we
are. These sound like the right
cues for us poets, too. Not all the poets in this anthology grew up
in Hawai`i; the roll of names reads like a cast of diasporic
characters. Many of these poets came to Hawai`i when they were
adults. Among those who grew up here, many left. They had the
privilege to come and go, to experience the stresses of “haoleness”
but then to leave. That privilege is not without its catch-22,
however. The privilege to move away can be seen as a reaction against
the difficulties of staying, difficulties that include publication,
as well as the problem of how to make a living in such an expensive
place. The complications of this position are reflected in much of
the writing, which uses cultural references that are Euro-American,
but also some that are native Hawaiian, and many that are simply “of
Hawai`i.” Euro-American writers are expected to have their careers
on the continent, not in Hawai`i. In 2005, Ron Silliman noted “that
is it—or always has been, up to now—virtually impossible for a
writer to go to Hawai`i & then become widely known & read on
the mainland. You
can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but
the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the
continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the
sun glare more or less entirely.” Ah, the “sun glare.” Leaving
aside the condescension, however well-meaning, of Silliman's
statement, his desire for Hawai`i's Euro-American writers (he
mentions none other in this post) to be read “back stateside,” as
he calls it, there's another problem. That problem, precisely the one
that concerns me here, is that Euro-American writers are
read on the continent, but not so much at home in Hawai`i.
Post-internet, it can be much easier to find a readership on the
North American continent (and in Australia, New Zealand and Great
Britain) than it is to find one in Honolulu. And this is often true
whether or not the poet writes about Hawai`i.
The
attention paid to Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, while not always
derogatory, is often so. Ian MacMillan, when he first began writing
about Hawai`i, was publically called to task for doing research on
canoe-making in books rather than by talking to Hawaiian elders. W.S.
Merwin has taken the most severe criticism of any poet, over his book
The
Folding Cliffs,
based on a memoir that Jack London originally appropriated from
Pi`ilani. This narrative told the history of Pi`ilani's husband
Koolau, who suffered leprosy and evaded authorities on Kaua`i for
years in the early 1890s, at the time the Hawaiian Kingdom was being
overthrown on O`ahu. In an essay titled, “The Literary Offenses of
W.S. Merwin,” Kapalai`ula de Silva writes, “If it is a
masterpiece [as Ted Hughes claimed in a blurb], it is a masterpiece
of literary colonialism.” Later in the essay, de Silva argues:
“Merwin’s
epic, however grand in scope and language, fails to honor Pi‘ilani’s
simple, bottom-line intent: the truth.” Here we have, at best, a
cultural divide: what is truth in an epic poem? Native Hawaiian truth
is different from Merwin's truth. While I find this essay extreme in
its attack on Merwin, I have also found myself explaining to white
writers on the continent why such an attack happened, why it is to be
expected, and why it should not be dismissed. I mention this
controversy not in order to flesh it out, but to point to the
difficulties of writing about Hawai`i. Merwin has lived on Maui since
the 1970s, where he has long been an environmental activist. But his
many decades in the state hardly immunized him to being called an
outsider. So the problem remains: what can a Euro-American poet write
about? How can she or he be responsible to this place on which there
have been so many claims? How to answer the question posed by another
of Merwin's poems, “Chord,” published in The
Rain in the Trees
(1988), namely the question of linguistic colonization?
While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood
forests
while he
listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through
the forests
while he sat
in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of
their gardens
their gardens
dying far away on the mountain
while the
sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives
while the tip
of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to
themselves
while he
thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers
when he lay
with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons
when he lay
watching the window they came home and lay down
and an age
arrived when everything was explained in another language
What pronoun(s)
will you use in writing about Euro-American poets? The
question of whether to speak of the anthology as a collection of “us”
or of “them” has been significant to me in thinking about this
collection. When I talk to other white writers who say, “I was
considered an artist before I moved to Hawai`i,” or “In Hawai`i,
I'm an editor not a poet,” or “that's a reading I can attend, but
can't participate in,” there's an implicit “we” between
speakers. But the conversation usually ends there, suggesting that we
are not speaking as community, but as individuals who lament the lack
of community. It's not my
intention in editing this anthology to create a community composed
solely of white writers. It is my
intention to call attention to the ways in which we (yes, we) write
about Hawai`i. Such calling-attention-to is meant to suggest ways to
form coalitions with non-white writers over issues like environmental
destruction, militarization, politics, and—let's not forget—the
ways in which we make our art. As I write, I notice the pronouns
shifting from us to them, from they to we, and will honor their
divergences from a stable subjectivity by permitting them their
pronomial diasporas.
Who publishes
Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i? Among
the small presses still in operation in 2012, only Bamboo Ridge's
annual journal, Tinfish Press, and occasionally the University of
Hawai`i Press, publish work by white poets. Bamboo Ridge has never
published a full-length book by a white poet. Tinfish Press, which I
founded in 1995, has published numerous chapbooks and full-length
books by white writers, but no full-length volumes by a white writer
living in Hawai`i (that will change when we publish Steve Shrader's
posthumous work). Meg Withers wrote A Communion of Saints,
which chronicled the 1980s AIDS
epidemic in Honolulu. Many of the voices spoke in Pidgin (Hawai`i
Creole English). Withers lived in Hawai`i for nine years, and has
since lived in the Bay Area of California. White poets publish on
the continent, necessity and choice interwoven in their books'
histories. Faye Kicknosway's selected poems are from Wesleyan.
Juliana Spahr published four books whose central subject is her five
years in Hawai`i: they were published by Wesleyan, the University of
California Press, Black Sparrow, and Atelos. Eric Paul Shaffer has
written books centered in Hawai`i, published by Leaping Dog Press in
Raleigh, North Carolina. Margo Berdeshevsky publishes with Sheep
Meadow Press in New York State, Endi Bogue Hartigan has book from the
press of Colorado Review,
and my poetry books have come out from Salt in the UK and Singing
Horse Press in San Diego. These writers may publish on the continent
because they want to, but the dearth of possibilities here in Hawai`i
surely forces their hands. To be published outside the state may
offer the Euro-American poet a bigger audience, but not one as
well-educated in the cultural values of Hawai`i or in its history,
its languages. To be published outside the state reaffirms the
impression that the Euro-American poet is not committed to working in
Hawai`i. That the Euro-American poet is an outsider. Another
Catch-22.
Tinfish
Press has resolutely refused to publish work because it is “ethnic.”
We've published experimental poetry from the Pacific by poets whose
work marries (however awkwardly) local and avant-garde traditions of
writing. Tinfish relishes experiments. I consider this anthology to
be an experiment, one likely not to be repeated. I came to it after
noting that Bamboo Ridge Press's anthologies of ethnic literature
from Hawai`i have been devoted to work by local Chinese, Filipino,
Korean, Hapa (mixed race), and native Hawaiian playwrights. Other
publishing concerns print work by native Hawaiians (`oiwi
) and
by Pacific Islanders (the new Ala Press).
As I read more general anthologies of literature from Hawai`i, like
Gavan Daws's and Bennett Hymer's enormous compendium, O`ahu
Stories: Two Centuries of Writing,
I notice that Hawaiian and local writers were offered categories
within the book, but Euro-American writers floated around in
categories that did not reference “the local” or “the
Hawaiian,” and yet never touched whiteness as category. Some of
these writers could be found in a section about Waikiki, for
instance, whose connection to whiteness is mostly by way of tourism.
Tourism is the outside flooding in. The ways in which white writers
are pegged as “outsiders” makes them, in the eyes of editors and
publishers, more like tourists than like native or local writers.
Who teaches Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i?
In researching course descriptions of English 370, Ethnic Literatures
of Hawai`i, I find no recent evidence of Euro-American poets or
fiction writers on the syllabi. Even where the course narrative for
Fall, 2011 includes the problematic category of “settler groups,”
there are no books by Euro-Americans, only local Asians. The frame to
the course, no matter who teaches it, oddly mirrors that of ethnic
studies on the continent, marking writers of color as “ethnic,”
Euro-American writers as non-existent. Surely, Hawai`i is one place
where white writers are marked as ethnic, where their work can be
read as such. When I went to the website for the Ethnic Studies
Department at UHM, I found listed a course called “Caucasians in
Hawai`i.” When I clicked to find the description of syllabi, I
found a list of courses taught since 2006. Nowhere on that list did
the course on Caucasians show up.
Speaking of editorial practice, in what way is this anthology an
“experiment” for Tinfish Press?
Years
ago, I taught a group directed reading on small press publishing, and
talk turned to the ways in which publication issues are fraught in
Hawai`i, we came up with the notion of “positive critique.”
Positive critique is what editors do; seeing the absence of an
important kind of writing, say, they move in to fill the gap. Rather
than attack institutions that leave them out, they create new
institutions, presses and reading series mostly. In the 1990s, Bamboo
Ridge was criticized for not publishing native Hawaiian writers;
`oiwi
was founded to provide a place for their work. This anthology is such
an act of positive critique. I write to suggest that more publishers
(some not yet in place, I suspect) print work by Euro-American poets
and that they do so in the long form. Books, not single poems here
and there.
One of my fears in pointing to this non-category category,
Euro-American poets, is that it will prove too persuasive, that white
writers will read and write for themselves only, that the larger
community will reify the category (either as another way to
re-marginalize white poets or as a way to honor them only as such).
This anthology poses a paradox; I'd like to call categories into
question by asserting the presence of one that exists but has been
too long left out of polite conversation. Only if white poets prove
that we have something to offer to the conversation will we be able
to join it, under different terms from those that existed until at
least 1980, if not longer. One venue at which these literary
conversations are already taking place is the MIA (Mixing Innovative
Arts) Reading Series, founded in 2009 by Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D.
candidate and poet in the English department. These readings occur
once a month during the school year, with workshops in the summer.
It's a venue that is open to every kind of writer, musician, and
performer. The cross-fertilizations have been striking.
What experiences do Hawai`i's white writers have in common, then?
I direct the reader to the statements by each of the poets included
in the anthology. They are eloquent testimonies to the ambivalent
status of being white in Hawai`i. These writers share the awareness
that it was mostly white people who suppressed Hawaiian culture, who
brought Asian contract labor into Hawai`i, and who to this day—as a
dominant force in the US military and politics—have made the state
into a militarized zone. They are also aware that white writers have
appropriated Hawaiian texts, remade them and circulated them as
flawed “truths” about Hawai`i. Does the name James Michener come
to mind? There's guilt in the blood-stream of the white writer. But
Euro-American poets also chafe against totalizing notions about who
they are and what they can or cannot write. They chafe against the
notion that they are “mainland” to the local/indigenous writer's
“Hawai`i.” One of my students, Mason Donald, who grew up in Hilo,
graduated from public schools and from the University of Hawai`i,
wrote the following poem out of frustration. The gatekeepers he
refers to were white, another of the many ironies:
My Potatoes
Don't write about Hula,
she explains to me. It's not yours.
Try working with hula
hoops instead. That's more fitting
to your . . . . personal subject position.
No, she says,
don't write about Kamapua`a.
Try working with something more
related. Do you eat pork?
No, don't write about Waikiki either.
Let's see you describe
your home. Where are you
from exactly?
I'd rather you stay away
from Pele, too, she explains.
Pele's such a wrathful God,
and I'd hate for her to disagree.
“Okay.
What about tourists?” I ask.
“Can
I write about the commodification
and sexual exploitation of Hawai`i?
Can I write about the gaze?”
No, no. You don't understand,
she continues.
Write
about your
home.
Write
about your
people.
“It's
not easy writing about a home
to which I don't belong,” I tell her.
It's not easy writing about
potatoes.
This poem, written for my class in 2007, is part of a significant
sub-genre, one that examines the costs of being identified as haole,
as someone who cannot write about Hawai`i. (In this anthology, Evan
Nagle has a rather different notion of what it means to write about
potatoes.) Another such poem is by Tony Quagliano, a poet who died
in 2007. He wrote a version of this poem many times, first as lament:
I stood there in the Pali wind
American, and local
guide
despairing of cross-cultural understanding —
I had just
recently learned
that I’m a haole
and later as satire:
A
Haole Writes One Local Poem
My
granmoddah wen fish
catch one trout
trout?
haole fish,
dat
she trow back
catch one
snappa den
hapa fish
bitta
she trow back
granmoddah
den
catch one ***
a local fish
pure you know
good fo
eat
good fo da soul
granny keep em
The
way in which white writers are taken to task became clearer to me
when I taught a Tinfish Press book by Portland poet Kaia Sand,
Remember to Wave.
Sand's
documentary work is about the Pacific Northwest, not about Hawai`i,
but in writing out the “secret histories” of her hometown of
Portland, Oregon, Sand includes the history of Japanese-American
internment. She puts her work in context, writing both a forward and
an afterword in which she explains her methods, her role as a
poet-journalist, her family background. But two students in the
upper-level class that was reading the book objected to her work.
They reminded me that she's of Norwegian and not Japanese heritage,
saying that her interest in the internment experience seemed odd to
them. One student, of whom I've very fond, came to my office and
extended the conversation by telling me that white teenagers have no
culture of their own, so they appropriate other cultures. Even being
an environmentalist she saw as a white person's appropriation of
another group's cause. She was echoing a thought I've heard before,
one that John Wythe White plays with when he writes about a character
with no culture, no home, no roots (see the headnote to this
introduction). That conversation stopped me in my tracks. Yes, there
is bad appropriation. But equally troubling is the notion that we
ought not to write and think about the histories of other groups of
people, those with whom we share our city streets, our schools, our
families.
Of course the sub-generic poem about being prevented from writing
about the place you live in quickly meets its limits. One can only
read so many of these poems without wondering if there isn't in fact
something better to spill ink over than one's inability to write
anything meaningful. Tony Quagliano wrote eloquent poems about jazz,
ended up writing as much about New Orleans as about Honolulu. Mason
Donald now teaches creative writing in Honolulu. One moves on. But
where? What are shared experiences that lead to poetry that
contributes to more than blasts of resentmentt? In what forms do we
choose to write? How do we navigate the rocky shoals of acknowledging
bad history while trying to make a better one? These are the
questions that each of the writers in this anthology addresses.
There
are no exact answers to these questions. The statements mostly
generate more questions. But the refinement of these questions, the
attention these writers devote to considering their work in the
context of living in Hawai`i, all these are important to witness.
Most of the poets whose work you will be reading write about Hawai`i;
others write (as they would not do otherwise) out of the experience
of whiteness they have encountered in Hawai`i. Faye Kicknosway, whose
work is not included here (she did not respond to my emails) wrote a
sequence of poems about the ways in which the Pacific is represented
in Hollywood movies. Several of her poems were published in an issue
of How2
in 2006 (see here: http://alturl.com/m9szo).
In that way, she elides the problem of writing about the places
themselves, instead honing in on how Hollywood interprets those
places for American consumption. Living in Hawai`i often demands that
the writer use more than one genre to encompass more than one voice,
that the writer move away from narrative and into a more experimental
(yet firmly grounded) mode. Anne Brewster's essay, “Teaching The
Tracker
in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness,” includes a fine meditation on
the question of just how to write out of what she calls “the
intersections of Anglo-Celtic creoleness with whiteness and with
Australian multiculture in a way that would address my affective
dispositions and equivocations.” (5). Her solution is
multi-generic, as it is for many of the writers in this anthology.
It's time to honor another way in which Hawai`i has affected its
poets, in this instance its Euro-American ones. To consider that
writing in Hawai`i is not always about Hawai`i is another way to say
that “Hawai`i writing” is more than is dreamed of in our current
philosophies.
Are there enough poets to fill the book? (This was a real
question.)
There are more than enough Euro-American poets to fill the book. Many
of the poets one might expect to see here are not here, for reasons
of editorial overlook or because they did not send work. No matter:
this anthology, which makes no claims to being comprehensive,
presents many wonderful poets, some of them older, many of them young
and just getting started. There could have been other batting orders.
This is the one that came up and it's a strong one.
Works Cited
Brewster,
Anne. “Teaching The
Tracker
in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness.” In The
Racial Politics
of
Bodies, Nations and Knowledges,
Eds. Barbara Baird and Eamien Riggs. Newcastle on
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing [in press].
Daws,
Gavan and Bennett Hymer. Honolulu
Stories: Voices of the Town Through the Years: Two
Centuries
of Writing.
Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2008.
de
Silva, Kapalai‘ula. "The Literary Offences of
W.S. Merwin’s Folding Cliffs.”
Frankenburg,
Ruth. White Woman,
Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Hagedorn,
Jessica. Charlie
Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction.
NY:
Penguin, 1993.
Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma
of being white, born and
raised
in Hawai`i.” Cultural
Values (6:3
2002): 273-285.
Rohrer, Judy. Haoles in Hawai`i. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i P, 2010.
Schultz, Susan M. “'Be a Haole, a Dumb Haole, or a Dumb Fucking
Haole': On White Writing
White,
John Wythe. “Surf Cities.” In Short-Timers
in Paradise. Honolulu:
Anoai Press, 2000.
Caroline Sinavaiana, born in Utulei, Tutuila, is Associate Professor of
English at UH-Manoa. Her creative work includes two collections of
poetry: Alchemies of Distance and Mohawk/Samoa. She is co-editor of a
special issue for Pacific Studies: Women Writing Oceania."Sina" will be reading from "Nuclear Medicine," her soon-to-be published
memoir about her treatment for breast cancer. The memoir is written in
three traditions, American, Samoan, and Buddhist, but also concerns
western medicine, which she terms "another country."
Susan M. Schultz is author of Dementia Blog (Volumes 1 and 2) and Memory
Cards: 2010-2011 Series, among other books. She edits Tinfish Press and
professes poetry and American literature at UH-Manoa. The two volumes
of Dementia Blog chronicle her mother's illness from 2006 until her
death in 2011.
