Haunani-Kay Trask : REFLECTION QUESTION 2 : What sustains you in your lifelong struggle to better the lives of Hawaiians?

Next REFLECTION QUESTION 3 / Back to MAIN HKT INDEX

Transcript

Well, I live with my people, that helps. You know, you can't be teaching this stuff in Madison and go out to 40 below weather. It just doesn't work. I see what I'm fighting for. So that renews you.

And of course, Hawaiians have a very strong spiritual connection to the land, as I do. So the ocean is my - as it is for many Hawaiians - is my cleansing place where I go. I spend a lot of time - not as much as I'd like - at the beach, at the shore.

Poetry is a great renewer of spiritual and lyrical powers. Poetry is beautiful. Art. Art is beautiful, which you know. Art is a great spiritual sustainer, especially in my case, poetry, because I'm a great lover of poetry. So I'm reading all the time people that I love. And it doesn't matter whether they're consciously political. Most poetry is political because it's the nature of writing to be in touch with the deepest parts of the human soul, and that's always revolutionary as we know, so. You know, I read Seamus Haney(1) a lot these days. And actually most of the poets I read were all imprisoned and then died, you know, like Nâzım Hikmet,(2) who was a Turkic poet and spent years, decades in prison. Or Palestinian poets - Mahmoud Darwish,(3) who I absolutely love. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o,(4) who's not a poet, but who's a creative writer, who's a very good friend of mine now.

I travel a lot. I give a lot of talks. It's great to be invited to go and give a talk. I'm going to the University of British Columbia to address the indigenous students at the law school, then I'm going to Oberlin. Then I come back and I go to Scripps and talk about Indigenous literature with Indians and Aboriginals and Maoris, and then I come home, and then I turn right around and go back to UCLA and talk about reparations and sovereignty. Then I'm going off to Australia to the racism conference, and then at the end of the summer I go to Durban, South Africa for the World Conference on Racism. So it's a lot of fertile engagement with great people, great human beings, who have thought in different ways about the same subject. It is magnificent to meet people that you yourself admire, who have kept on struggling, like Angela Davis(5) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It has nothing to do with their personality in one sense. It has everything to do with their character. That they persevered.

I would love, before I die, to meet Aung San Suu Kyi.(6) I would love to meet her. What an amazing woman. What an amazing, amazing woman. When her husband was dying and they let him come, the generals, to visit her in the hopes that she would leave with him, I knew exactly what they were doing. So did her husband, so did she. And they had two weeks together, and that's the last she ever saw him, and then he died later. What an enormous price to pay for what it is you must do.

So it's not a lonely profession in that sense. All of these people are alive to me, and I talk to them. (laughs) My students sort of think that's weird, but it really isn't. It's not weird at all. I mean if you love literature as much as I do, you know, I'm always reading people and talk about them as though I know them, like Seamus Haney because I'm reading them lately. Or I used to talk about Mao(7) all the time, and you know, Mao says this and Mao says that. And then Eiko(8) and I were saying, well, you know Gramsci(9) said this. But you know what does that mean in the context of today? What does that mean? What would he say? So before you know it, these people are no longer dead.

And that's that great stream of resistance that keeps you alive - in your own time, and after you're gone. I have no doubt in my mind that Hawaiians a hundred years from now will still be reading me. Just like I'm reading the queen,(10) just like I read Wilcox.(11) I know it. What a comfort.

I don't have that feeling that haoles(12) do, that they're alienated and they're all alone in the world. Only haoles could think that. Everybody else in the world knows that they're not alone. Only haoles think they're alone. I mean, talk about being blind - they're surrounded by millions of people! (laughs) What is the beginning of Fanon's(13) book? Sartre(14) says, yes, in the world there are something like four million white people and 70 million Natives, you know? Yeah, because white people go, "Really?? No!" Only white people could come up with the idea of loneliness. You know, I remember - who was it… somebody I know real well, a Hawaiian - one of my students just said, "God, I'd like to be lonely, but you know, I just can't get away from my family. My God, we've got cousins..." The poor are never alone! Don't you understand that? The bourgeoisie, you know, who are you talking about? Existentialism(15) had to have been created by French intellectuals, Hawaiians could never create it. We wouldn't even have the time to think about it! (laughs)

Notes

(1) Seamus Haney (b. 1939): Irish poet, essayist, and translator,  Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995) are two prose works that address the relationship of art to social responsibility.

(2) Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963): Marxist poet, filmmaker, essayist, and dramatist, Hikmet came to symbolize the conflict between the state and critical intellectuals when the Turkish government declared him a terrorist, imprisoned him, banned his poetry, and stripped him of his citizenship. His written works include the epic poem Human Landscapes and Was There an Ivan Ivanovich or Not?, a satire on Stalinism.

(3) Mahmoud Darwish (b. 1941): Palestinian poet, nationalist, and former member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, Darwish has continued to write and speak against the violence of Israeli dispossession and occupation despite persecution and eventual exile. His written works include Memory for Forgetfulness:  August, Beirut, 1982 (1995), and The Adam of Two Edens: Selected Poems (2001).

(4) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (b. 1938): East African writer and educator, Ngũgĩ was imprisoned and his novels and plays banned by the Kenyan government for their populist perspectives, as well as for their discussion of controversial issues such as struggling for independence and nation-building. Also influential has been his decision to write literature and criticism in his native language of Gĩkũyũ rather than in English (the colonial tongue):

The language of an African child's formal education was foreign. The language of the books he had read was foreign... For a colonial child, the harmony existing between [language] as communication was irrevocably broken. This resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation. The alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe... This disassociation, divorce, or alienation from the immediate environment becomes clearer when you look at the colonial language as a carrier of culture. - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986)

(5) Angela Davis (b. 1944): Black activist, educator, and author of six books on subjects ranging from Black feminist issues to racism in the U.S. prison industrial complex. In 1970 Davis was placed on the FBI’s infamous “10 most wanted list” when she was falsely implicated as part of an escape and kidnap attempt from the Marin County courthouse in which three people, including a judge, were killed. She was later captured, jailed, tried, and ultimately cleared of all charges in 1972. Currently a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Davis remains one of the most outspoken and influential voices against institutionalized racism and state terrorism both in the U.S. and internationally. Her books include Angela Davis:  An  Autobiography (1974), Women, Race, and Class (1982), and The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998).

(6) Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945): Leader of the National League of Democracy (NLD) in Burma, 1991 Nobel Peace Laureate, and human rights spokesperson, Aung San Suu Kyi has led the nonviolent opposition to the military junta since its takeover of Burma in 1988.  Her written works include Freedom From Fear and Other Writings (1995) and Letters From Burma (1995).

(7) Mao Zedong (1893-1976): Also Mao Tse-tung. Chinese theorist, revolutionary, and founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, serving as the country’s first head of state (1949-1959). He was also instrumental in leading the Long March (1934-1935), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the founding of communes, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969).

(8) Eiko Kosasa: Longtime ally and friend.

(9) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): Italian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and general secretary of the Communist Party in Italy (from 1924 until 1928, the date of his arrest and life-imprisonment). While in prison Gramsci wrote extensively on history, education, philosophy, politics, the state and civil society, Marxism, and Americanism. These writings have been published as Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s original contributions include the concept of “organic intellectuals” and their role in revolutionizing society, and the concept of hegemony, both political and cultural, as reflected in cultural and political domination.

(10) Queen Liliʻuokalani (1838-1917): Writer, composer, and last reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Liliʻuokalani was deposed on January 17, 1893 by American marines and a small group of white businessmen (led by Sanford B. Dole).  In her official protest, she wrote:

I, Liliuokalani, by the grace of God and under the constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom, Queen, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a Provisional Government of and for this kingdom.

That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose Minister Plenipotentiary, His Excellency John L. Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu, and declared that he would support the said Provisional Government.

Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life, I do, under this protest and impelled by said forces, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being represented to it, undo the action of its representative, and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.

Done at Honolulu this seventeenth day of January, A.D. 1893. (reproduced in Liliuokalani, H.R.M., Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, 1898. republished by Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle Co., 1964. pages 387-388.)

(11) Robert William Kalanihiapo Wilcox (1855-1903): Led armed rebellions in 1888 and again in 1889 against the all-white haole cabal called the “Reform Government.” The rebellions were put down and Wilcox was tried for high treason, but a jury of Hawaiians found him not guilty. Wilcox was unsuccessful in attempting to overthrow the illegal government a third time in 1895. After annexation, in 1900, Wilcox became Hawaiʻi's first delegate to the U.S. Congress under the Aloha ʻĀina Party. The “Iron Duke of Hawaiʻi” as he was known in his time, fought for Hawaiian rights under the principle of “Hawaiʻi for the Hawaiians” and remains a symbol of Hawaiian resistance to foreign rule to this day.

(12) Haole is the Hawaiian word for foreign things (including foreign people) and was originally used to refer to all foreigners. Today, the word refers only to white people.

(13) Frantz Fanon (1925-1961): A psychiatrist by training, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is regarded as a classic of revolutionary theory. Born in Martinique and educated in France, Fanon practiced at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria and soon joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in a struggle for an Algeria independent from French colonial rule. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon analyzed the strengths and pitfalls of a colonized people moving toward independence. Fanon argued:

The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.  Whatever the native may gain through political or armed struggle is not the result of the kindliness or good will of the settler; it simply shows that he cannot put off granting concessions any longer. Moreover, the native ought to realize that it is not colonialism that grants such concessions, but he himself that extorts them. (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. pages 142-143.)

Other works by Fanon include Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (1964).

(14) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Sartre was influential among progressive intellectuals as an essayist and editor of leftist journals and newspapers. He was critical of the aggressive and militarized foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union, and considered both countries to be guilty of Cold War imperialism.

(15) Existentialism: Philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness of experience and isolation of the individual in society. Existentialism emerged as an influential movement especially among European intellectuals active in the social and political upheavals of the post-World War II era. Its central themes included “freedom of choice” and the responsibility of all individuals for their own decisions and actions, including popular struggle.