Is the history of the exploited ever lost, or do we demand it be erased?
Linnea Axelsson, in her novel written completely in minimal verse, Ӕdnan (2024), uses the epic as a means of revitalizing repressed history. Trauma inflicted by Swedish imperialism is reclaimed by three generations of Sámi Indigenous women. Modeled on the joik, a traditional Sámi song that has no beginning or end, Axelsson is able to continue a past that was unspoken. Or perhaps more accurately, forced to be forgotten.
Despite being half a world away, the connection between the Sámi and Kanaka Maoli resistance is one that transcends borders.
Megan Kamelei Kakimoto begins her debut short story collection Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare by reminding us of things we should not forget. Kakimoto’s opening chapter title, “A Catalogue of Kānaka Superstitions, as Told by Your Mother,” is strikingly reminiscent of Moby Dick’s “Extracts: Supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.” Both books begin outside the narrative: Melville inventories facts about the whaling industry, Kakimoto catalogs superstitions. These are warnings to be kept in mind while reading these stories. After all, this is our mother talking.
“Don’t whistle at night! You know what happens if the Night Marchers hear you? You know how fast they’ll climb over the Ko’olaus just to whittle down your spirit? You’ll have to put everything you’ve got into evading them should you hope to whistle and live. My baby honey girl, don’t you want to live?”
It would be easy to write a whole essay on just this introduction. By refusing to give context to these superstitions, Kakimoto demands a space in which Kanaka, Japanese, and Hawaiian identity can exist on their own terms. In his Norton lectures, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that “refusing to translate was crucial to denying subjugation and otherness, a challenge inextricable from finding and claiming my voice.”
Now the reader knows all the rules, so what do these characters do? Break one.
What is more terrifying than one’s own body changing? The curtain rises with a story brimming with blood, gothic undertones, and the Romantic power of the sublime. Sadie, due to driving over the Pali highway with leftover pork, begins to experience her period for the first time with absurd quantities of blood. After futile attempts are made to put an end to her period via fasting and dieting, Sadie embraces her fate. Neither her suffering, nor the body horror, is not what induces terror in the reader; in fact, she accepts an unending flood of blood with open arms. What is unsettling is her welcoming of what is so vile to white imperialist standards.
The use of pidgin dialect in dialogue and the untranslated use of Native Hawaiian throughout the collection implies both an audience who understands these languages, as well as a reader who knows nothing of either (like myself) but is willing to learn. Had Kakimoto decided to provide in-text explanations, this would have created a very different reading experience. But she is committed to writing stories for a Hawaiian reader. And for those unfamiliar, after reading the names and phrases a few times and looking them up in a Hawaiian-English dictionary, you build a working vocabulary. We aren’t outside of the text; we participate in it.
The untranslated Hawaiian language is a way of “denying subjugation and otherness,” to use Nguyen’s phrasing. A double movement is taking place throughout these stories. Like many other authors, Kakimoto writes dialogue in dialect to accurately represent how people speak, allowing the reader to see a real community reflected in the text. But she takes it a step further, expanding representation into the prose by using Native Hawaiian language to bring the narrator and the reader into a Hawaiian space. Unlike a typically neutral, well-to-do narrator observing another world, there is no glass separating the characters, the narrators, and the reader.
“There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand … Don’t bother with accessibility. Even when you write white, the white readers won’t make sense of it. Bother with specificity. Be exacting and specific. Write in ‘ōlelo Hawai’i when you can. Write dialogue in pidgin, because dialect is important. Most importantly, honor the kapu. Do not write about what you cannot write about.”
There is a very palpable anxiety that runs through this short story collection. There are unspoken rules about what constitutes Indigenous fiction and folklore in a world dominated by white publishers. Is this just another book for a publisher to claim as representation?
In many ways, this is the preoccupation of Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure (2001). Not only the anxiety of being “boxed in” by white publishers who want a book that is “Black” but also the anxiety of what it means to be a Black author who writes books that are considered too far outside the realm of what Black writers are “supposed” to write about: pain and suffering in the ghetto. Everett tells the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a Black author whose books are considered too academic and do not sell. In a fit of rage, Ellison writes a novel satirizing the racist ghetto books distributed by major publishers. The novel is so exaggerated in its racist caricatures it couldn’t possibly be published. Until it is. The content and form of Erasure and the novel within the novel that Ellison/Everett writes leave the reader not entirely unscathed.
While this is a concern of Kakimoto’s, her stories are not consumed by this anxiety. Instead of an existential rumination on racism and representation in literature and the publishing industry, Kakimoto spends her time seeking ways to craft stories which can occupy small pockets of resistance. These pockets contain whirlpools of unsettling horror, which offer a guiding current. More than a critique of imperialism, racism, and oppression, these stories are Kanaka, Japanese, and Hawaiian on their own terms. Kakimoto goes beyond simply “being seen” in a representational sense. These stories are about simply being.
Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism that stories serve as fulfilment of a kind of fantasy. Novels, specifically those written by 19th- and 20th-century Europeans, are a particular kind of fiction that prevent the emergence of liberatory forms of narrative. The proliferation of this kind of fiction created a format for what constitutes “good” fiction. This fiction also happens to be non-threatening and upholds the political and economic status quo. A good writer will explore how to break this imposed mold and foster alternatives.
Imperialism demands that history be inaccessible. The present is all there is, and it stretches to infinity in both directions. It rejects any notion of continuity with the past, that life was and could still be different. Aisha Ariella Azoulay writes how the theft and display of objects by archives and museums is “similar to that of the operation of a camera shutter, the unending instantiation of their separation is reiterated …The right to dissect and study people’s worlds … and render their fragments into pieces to be copied is taken for granted.”
Kakimoto’s stories put into question this very presupposition. She pulls the rug out from under our feet, or rather, keeps the shutter of history open, daring us to close it, lest we think we know everything we need to know about Hawai’i, its people, and its language. When memory is constantly asked to be forgotten, any remembrance is a form of resistance. Hawai’i is not a place for white fantasies to become fulfilled. It is a nightmare.
