Hawaiian Music, Poetry and Dance: Reflections on Protection, Preservation and Pride

posturing and form (see, for example, Adrienne L. Kaeppler, "Dance and the Interpretation of Pacific Traditional Literature" in Directions in Pacific Traditional Literature, Kaeppler, ed., Honolulu: 1976). The classic source on the hula is 58 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.176 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:18:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HAWAIIAN MUSIC, POETRY AND DANCE Nathaniel E. Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (Rutland, Vt. and Tokyo: 1965, orig. 1909); a recent work called simply The Hula by Jerry Hopkins (Hong Kong: 1982) gives an overall picture concentrating on nineteenth and twentieth century developments. I am told that there are some minor factual errors and questionable interpretations (as there are in Emerson as well), but over all it is a reliable source. I have only recently seen two minor, but interesting, confirmations of the ubiquity of the dance as an extension of poetry within the Asian-Pacific culture area Kaepler projects. When Kalena Silva appeared in one of my classes for a lecture-demonstration in relation to Hawaiian chant, a Vietnamese girl immediately noted the story-telling nature of the dance (hula) before it was pointed out. Another Vietnamese student, a boy, who has been doing extensive work in dance, choreographed an evocative (and heartbreaking) sequence based on his memories of the homeland. In the program notes for the production he inserted this quotation from Bienvenido Santos' "Scent of Apples": "How many times did the lonely mind take unpleasant detours away from the familiar winding lanes toward home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost youth, the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the exile knows" because "that is what I feel when I am dancing": a validation of the dance by the word, of the word by the dance. Of all the student choreographers in that particular program he was the only one who seemed constrained to include something more than the purely technical or descriptive in his program statement. 13. Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, pp. 11-12, 13. While clearly aware of the traditional and ritual nature of the hula, Emerson seems to have trouble conceiving of the dance in terms other than a performing art which leads to considerable ambiguity in his attempts to describe clearly its function in society. He speaks of the hula as "a creature of royal support, and for good reason. The actors in this institution were not producers of life's necessaries." Then follows a comparison with ancient Rome where "it was a senator or general enriched by the spoil of a province, who promoted the sports of the arena, so in ancient Hawaii it was the chief or headman of the district who took the initiative in the promotion of the people's communistic sports and of the hula" (p. 26). This is putting a false face on the very real difficulties, the harsh price that must be paid in all movements from the sacred to the secular. For more on this see Philippa Pollenz, "Changes in the Form and Function of Hawaiian Hulas," American Anthropologist 52 (1950), 225-34. 14. John R. K. Topolinski, "Hula" in Kamahele. 15. E. S. Handy, Polynesian Religion (Honolulu: 1927), a basic source. 16. The animistic perceptions have not been totally lost, as even a quick reading of Holt's novel would indicate. In this context I would like to quote Soyinka again (pp. 12-13) where he is speaking of poetry that "is structured within a conceptual tradition which embodies essentials of the metaphysics of the African world." He goes on: "The interfusion of object, thought and spirit is not however peculiar to the African mind. But the quality which separates such poems . . . from the Surrealist to take one example is their avoidance of the Mallarmean extreme, the occidental indulgence which gives an autogenetic existence to the expression of the symbolic-mythical world of the creative imagination, severed arbitrarily from other realities. ... If we shed the general meaning attached to the word "superstition," prepare to understand the laws that govern its formulation as belonging to the same laws that enable human beings to imbue incident and matter even with 59 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.176 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:18:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms