Language is my preferred milieu (I am, by vocation, a writer). Language is equally my nemesis. Every year the good folks responsible for dictionary inclusion of hitherto unlisted words determine their choices. At some point in an unremarkable, modern history, an academic phrase gained wider usage and “Cultural Appropriation” was endorsed.
But only in recent years has that phrase become a cudgel. Writers, visual artists, and all forms of creators now struggle with the moral implications of stealing from a people or a place they were not born to. I am no exception.
I have written, for these past 26 years, about the ancient Native Hawaiian culture. I am not Native Hawaiian. I have largely escaped censure for a singular reason: I am married to a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner – a Kahu – and I have couched my observations and opinions largely by referencing his own words.
I write not a single word about my husband’s people or culture without hiding firmly behind his rather substantial physical and spiritual presence. He hears my words and agrees or disagrees to them before they are published.
For most of these years, we have spoken publicly together. He speaks of his ancient practices; I speak of my immersion as a stranger into those practices, and how much it both asked and gifted.
I was not a child when we met and married. I had a fully formed identity. I was an author and single mother for many years. I owned a home elsewhere, and taught writing workshops to support my sons.
When ‘Iokepa and I speak in our varied venues, I look at the Hawaiian faces scattered among our Caucasian audiences and I announce upfront: “I am a Jewish woman from Baltimore and I have culture up to here” (my hand choking at my neck). There’s usually laughter. Then I say: “My mother taught me how to be a good guest. I am a guest of the Native Hawaiian people.” I watch the indigenous faces relax.
I have once, only once, erred in speaking my presumed deeper cultural knowledge to a Native Hawaiian woman. Her outraged response (“I hate it when a non-Hawaiian tells me…!”) cured me of any impulse to “know better than…” I do not. I cannot. I have not lived the fullness of that crushing colonization, nor the generous gifts of the ancestral wisdom.
So yes, my husband ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani righteously insists: “Cultural appropriation is hurtful, since someone is assuming the identity of a group without having faced the suffering and discrimination that group endured.”
But I respond: I have something to say, and what I have to say cannot be said by a Native Hawaiian. I have a singular lived-experience – and yes, it has been adjacent to their culture and within their homeland – but it is not theirs. And from that experience comes art.
I write now, neither to silence nor preempt the authenticity of my husband or his people. I presume, rather, to speak on behalf of creators, of the act of creation, of making art. I speak of the necessity to remove just about every single boundary that stifles the creative force.
My lifelong friend is a gifted fine art photographer, a bold artist in a world of definitionally bold artists. She doesn’t scare easily. Yet. as we speak, she’s terrified to release her powerful images from several years’ work in Vietnam. She is not Vietnamese.
In a climate of outraged condemnation of any artist who dares write, paint, or speak from a culture not her own, too many are silenced.
So, here we are, the good-hearted, well-meaning among us: those who already feel aligned with the interests of the oppressed, colonized, and othered people of the world. And here we are again, so often the artists - the creators of something new. We are the very same good folks, needlessly at odds with ourselves.
Let’s step back for a moment here. I refuse to feel that conflict. I am not ‘Iokepa, the Native. I am Inette, the writer. I have lived 26 years among a people who I clearly have experienced through my own heart and my own eyes. I – and frankly every creative observer – has that right and necessity.
And as with all serious works of art, we can love them, hate them, be educated by them – or refuse to look. That choice is ours.