'Iokepa and I have been gratified by the considerable response to the "Add Your Voice to the Cry for Freedom" essay that precedes this one on this page. From just one of our supporters in faraway Virginia: "My eyes were filled with tears as I read the Ever Changing Page account of 'Iokepa at the hearings. It surely feels as if the tide is starting to turn. What an amazing and intense time. I was picturing and feeling 'Iokepa... broadcasting out from within as he stood before the Hawaiians gathered at the hearing. How empowering. It is really happening. It touches a cry deep place within me. I am looking forward to watching this all unfold. The U.S. government is facing way more than they realize. The light is overcoming the dark."
For the last six months, we were on the road with our new book, The Return Voyage; we drove across the American continent and spoke out on behalf of my husband's people. We return home to witness the budding fruit of years ofloving-labor on behalf of the sorely oppressed Native Hawaiian people, and their inspiring culture.
Thanks to Doctor Seuss, when the calendar announces the annual cap and gown ceremonies, his classic book (named in the title of this essay) speaks to the day. I think of this now becauseit's June and there is another generation heading into those places. Some of those places will be comforting; some, threatening - that's the Seuss-an map. 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I have a couple weeks left before our flight home to Hawai'i from this pastoral spot in Virginia. I'm reminded that there's a story that remains to be told before we leave. It could be called, "Oh The Places We've Been..." Perhaps, it is these words rather than Dr. Seuss's(we're not, after all, twenty-two year old grads) that should head this post.
September will mark seven years since 'Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I took this low-tech, low-profile, ancestral-driven show on the road. That is seven years since we packed up our ten years of grooming on the beaches of Hawai'i and took the Hawaiian Grandmothers' wisdom and our stories to those willing ears and hearts across the United States. In these years, 'Iokepa has repeated his Grandmothers' words often. He's been nothing if now consistent. When the good folks in our audiences raise their hands and ask, "What can I do to help?," he has answered always, "When you hear something positive happening on the Islands, please offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people."
There is a new member of our family, and all words feel patently ridiculously predictable. "Miraculous" doesn't replicate the adrenaline rush, the heart-thumping anxieties, the feel of that newly exposed-to-our-atmosphere skin. 'Iokepa and I were immutable fixtures just outside the door at the moment ofher birth (and for ten hours before). We were inside that door with baby in arms immediately after. (At the climatic moments I was literally on my knees with my head glued to the door.)
The last three months on the road with The Return Voyage have been snugly scheduled with just a bit of breathing room. Our schedule page tells the story. We've just returned fromour spin through the southeastern states; we're back at our base camp here in the northern Shenandoah Valley. We are now doing something that 'Iokepa and I very seldom do - we are waiting. We do not wait, because indigenous Hawaiians did not wait. Like all tribal peoples, they lived every moment - no, every breath - with absolute awareness that it might be their last. There was only today, this breath. Everything else was illusory; everything future was unknowable. To expect, to wait, was to refuse to live this breath fully.
It is winter on my skin and in my bones. I am bundled from the top of my head to my wool-encased feet. The plunge from eighty degrees to twenty degrees was abrupt and challenging. The first question we've been asked during the past couple weeks in Seattle and Portland, in Baltimore and now in northern Virginia is: "Why are you here in the winter?" We are here in the winter because that is when folks choose to come out of their caves to attend book events, to listen to the itinerant speaker - to invite us to share our story. In the summer and autumn they are traveling and active in other ways.
This is a story that I’ve never before told. I hesitate even now – perhaps twelve years after the fact. My hesitation still hinges on Thanksgiving, for goodness sake. Thanksgiving: uncontaminated by commercialism; serving up my favorite foods; and celebrating gratitude. It’s a hard holiday not to love.
Racism: it’s in no way subtle. But neither is it consistent. There are ironies that would be laughable if they weren’t so painful. Like a bad joke, it only hurts when I laugh. So our president, Mr. Barack Obama – whose mother hails from Kansas and whose father was the son of an African tribal chief (making our president by any mathematical calculation half white and half black, and royalty to boot) – had his fate sealed in American eyes, word, and deed. He is simply “Black;” no subtleties are permitted.
The ancestral grandmothers have spoken. ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I are on the edge of our seats with excitement. Huliau–the Return Voyage is about to shift into an entirely new direction. The goal remains the same. Within the authentic Native Hawaiian experience lies the answer for a contemporary world tormented by rage, greed, and war. It is ours to seize the ancients’ gifts – to return to that which all of us are born knowing. We carry it in our very bones, this memory of another way.
Tell me why it’s so much easier for modern men and women to delineate – to draw big black lines around our thoughts and our hearts, to categorize, to isolate, toseparate – than not. Oddly, this ability has come to pass for intelligent, educated discourse, for a level of sophistication. I suggest that it is none of the above. Now tell me why aboriginal men and women (the ones whom we tend to dismiss as primitive) saw only unity, only the connections, the relationships, the whole. They could not, in fact, see other than that.
On January 13, 2012, my oldest friend on this earth died. She was the model of modesty, empathy and a hard-work that she consistently made to look easy - in sum, grace.
On May 20, 2012, 'Iokepa and I were crushed in our automobile by ayoung man driving 80 miles an hour in a 40 mile zone - heavily intoxicated and then running on foot away from our destroyed car and my damaged body. When we met this truly nice young man days afterwards - in a jail cell - he touched us deeply with the goodness of himself and his life. We found the divine where we least expected it.
For five autumns now, ‘Iokepa and I have found ourselves strangers in unknown distant cities. Each year we’ve had to unearth a Jewish congregation from the yellow pages, and solicit an invitation to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in their large urban synagogue. Without exception, we’ve been embraced. But it is here in our tiny Kaua’i Jewish Community that we find home. Blessedly, we are home again this year for these most sacred Days of Awe.
So, Hawai'i - as in, 'I've always dreamed of...' or 'I will go before I die...' or'I once went and it was incredible...' (versions of which'Iokepa and I hear daily) - becomes the metaphor.And that metaphor is not just the fantasy of a tropical Island paradise - beaches, coconuts, and aloha. It is the fantasy of the way life can be lived, should be lived, once was lived - without greed, competition, judgement, fear, racism, war - and strangers regarded as the other.
Okay, so this is what I remember of the story I’m about to tell: absolutely nothing. It’s a black hole of a story, but it is quite a story nevertheless, as ‘Iokepa slowly reveals it to my still erratic (but getting sharper every day) Swiss cheese of a memory bank. The “Before”
It's a very funny thing about being a writer. I complete a book. I've said everything that I have to say about the matter. Then the book tour begins, and I am expected to say more - much more. And when the questions begin, silence is just not an option: not on radio, not on TV, not in print. Writing the book Grandmothers Whisper was completely in my hands. But my control stopped there. I cannot - will not - pretend to know how any single human heart and mind will respond to their reading of Grandmothers Whisper. I do know that each of us brings our own story to bear on the one we read on the page.
…Every last one us is the son or daughter of a couple of them. So choose your perspective here. I can tell my story from the only perspective I have: the singular daughter of two very specific people; the mother of two very specific sons. But like all writing, the micro or anecdotal only has meaning if it sheds light on the universal.
'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I live a life that is at odds with the person that I am - and yet it is not. This life addresses just one half of me - the half that communicates meaningfully with other humans. My very destiny is caught up with the skill, the need, the substance of words - speaking them aloud, writing them within the hearing of other ears. Both fulfill me amply; it is my nature. I grew up in a family that encouraged exactly that.
I have written about destiny. ‘Iokepa has spoken of it. He calls it the promise we made when we took on life. Yet there is persistent bewilderment among moderns who have refused it. Echoing the Hawaiian grandmothers, I have written: no one of us is born with the same destiny; we’re gifted with individual and cultural gifts to help realize our specific promises.
I first met Merrell Fort Gregory in 1969 sitting at a desk across a tiny newsroom. It was my first newspaper job out of college. The Maryland Gazette - calling itself "the oldest continuously published paper in America" - was a weekly. We were two of a staff of six. I was twenty-two; Merrell was a year older with twelve months experience. On the strength of that experience, I thought she was the epitome of a seasoned reporter.
