Haunani-Kay Trask : REFLECTION QUESTION 6 : What are you turning your attention to next?

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Transcript

You know, I have in my own way taken another turn in my life. I realize that I'm 51 and I have this much time left on Earth and bam! I gotta write 10 more books. I spent years and years writing articles and not saying, "No, I'm not gonna do this." I mean, if I was to sit down someday and do memoirs and write of all my struggles, I would just be shocked that I ever survived it. There's so many of them. Now what I'd like to do is to leave a record.

See, in many ways Gramsci(1) was very fortunate because he was in prison. This is a terrible thing to say, but if Gramsci wasn't in prison, would he have written all this? Would he have been still writing these old pieces for the Avanti magazine?(2) I don't want to be in prison, but in one sense I have another level of contribution that absolutely needs to be made. Absolutely. If I don't make it, nobody else is going to. There's no question in my mind that the burden I have right now in this historical moment is to record that history. Nobody else is gonna do it. Nobody else is trained to do it.

So I don't want for children's-children's generation to come back and say there's nothing except The Advertiser and The Star Bulletin.(3) That's why I wrote From a Native Daughter. So I think that it's very important, like it was for Marx(4) and Gramsci, the little bits and pieces I love of these people is when they're not writing big theory. They're just saying, "Arrrhh!!!" - you know, against so-and-so. Gramsci's writing against some guy with his stupid whatever, Father Bresciani’s progeny(5) about it... You know, that's where he hones his theory that comes out of linguistics about hegemony.(6) And here's Marx, you know, writing off angry notes here and there! Before you get to Kapital(7) - which is monumental - before you get there, there's all this other stuff! These guys were writing all the time!

So I have become, in a sense, obsessed with writing as I get older. So I'm writing all the time. I have to, because who knows? I may get hit by a truck tomorrow and that's the end of it.

Notes

(1) 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, as it is reflected in cultural and political domination.

(2) Avanti!: The daily newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party to which Gramsci was a regular contributor. Avanti! was founded in 1896 but banned by Mussolini in 1926. Restored to operation in 1943, Avanti! remains in print today.

(3) The Honolulu Advertiser and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin: The two largest settler daily newspapers in Hawaiʻi.

(4) Karl Marx (1818-1883): German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary, his most widely known works were written with Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894) - in which history is analyzed as a result of contradictory economic forces and the resulting war between the ruling classes and the subordinated classes.

(5) Antonio Bresciani (1798-1862): An influential Italian priest and writer that embodied a populist, political conservatism that Gramsci despised. The label “Father Bresciani’s progeny” refers to ideologically similar writers.

(6) Hegemony: Domination of citizens by the state (e.g., U.S. hegemony over Native Hawaiians). Drawing from Karl Marx’s writings, V.I. Lenin describes the concept of hegemony as a state’s domination of its citizens through its political society and the public institutions that comprise it (military, courts, legislature / parliament, etc.). Antonio Gramsci expands upon Lenin’s concept and argues that the modern state’s presence and influence are unmistakably found in civil society and private institutions that comprise it (newspapers, films, television, schools, churches, etc.). The institutions of civil society always reproduce the dominant group’s cultural values and ideologies. For Gramsci, there is never a moment when the state is not managing its citizens - either directly (via public institutions) or indirectly (via private institutions).

(7) Das Kapital: (or, Capital, first published in 1887) The original critique of capitalism, and ultimately the historical transformation of modern society, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Excerpt from “From a Native Daughter.”

Which history do Western historians desire to know? Is it to be a tale of writings by their own countrymen, individuals convinced of their "unique" capacity for analysis, looking at us with Western eyes, thinking about us within Western philosophical contexts, categorizing us by Western indices, judging us by Judeo-Christian morals, exhorting us to capitalist achievements, and finally, leaving us an authoritative-because-Western record of their complete misunderstanding?

...They must come, as American Indians suggested long ago, to understand the land. Not in the Western way, but in the indigenous way, the way of living within and protecting the bond between people and the ʻāina. This bond is cultural, and it can be understood only culturally. But because the West has lost any cultural understanding of the bond between people and the land, it is not possible to know this connection through Western culture.  This means that the history of indigenous people cannot be written from within Western culture. Such a story is merely the West's story of itself.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. pages 120-121.)