I hear Hawaii’s mythologies in the voice of Grams. Now gone for nearly as much of my life as she was a part of it, Grams wove tales throughout my childhood of the verdant Kāneʻohe landscape and the vibrant Hawaiian mythological figures who populated it. The Night Marchers and Menehune; and the wahi pana, or sacred sites, where the bones of our ancestors were buried.
The language of her retelling of our moʻolelo – our ancestral stories – was poignant and imprecise, a bit dreamlike, with a current of threat vibrating under each syllable. I can still feel under my ʻokole the vibrations of the flip-and-fold seats she had installed in her truck to hold me, my sister, and my cousins as she drove us around the island, enthralling and alarming us in equal measure with the stories of our people. Stories such as the dangers of driving the Pali Highway while carrying pork. The pork represents the Hawaiian god Kamapuaʻa, a half-hog half-man whose libidinous desire and aggression clashed with the fire goddess, Pele, a powerful and capricious figure famed among the Hawaiian pantheon. Legend speaks of a brutal fight between the two entities resulting in a bisecting of the land – Pele gets the leeward side, Kamapuaʻa, the windward side. By travelling the Pali with pork, you are essentially ushering Kamapuaʻa into Pele’s territory, the consequences of which range from a broken-down car to a lifetime of bad luck.
I had the Pali Highway on my mind while writing the title story of Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare, in which a young woman’s rejection of a local legend augurs a difficult relationship with her growing body. There are other superstitions that nag at the collection’s stories, among them: don’t kill a moth or moʻo (gecko), a family spirit, for they will never be at peace in the afterlife. Don’t stand in the middle of two people, for you will be the first among them to die. Don’t whistle at night, for you are calling forth the Night Marchers.
I am aware of how these stories might sound to outside ears. Perhaps a little silly – who would believe such a tale? I wrestled with how the collection’s myths might be perceived throughout the publication process. How do I articulate to an audience outside our Hawaiian experience the gravity of our cultural mythologies, that we don’t regard them as frivolous superstitions but as facets of our reality, as real as the ʻāina beneath our feet?
Growing up in Hawaii, tales of the Haunted Pali and the Night Marchers – spirits of ancient Hawaiian warriors who are now fierce protectors of the islands’ sacred lands – were pervasive and profoundly affecting. I understood them to be grounded in our cultural truths, never questioned their legitimacy. But I rarely saw our mythology, our moʻolelo, represented in fiction, and felt compelled to right this wrong. As a reader and writer, I am ravenous for Hawaiian stories from Hawaiian perspectives; it is my wish to see our people take up space in contemporary literature. Yet I am also aware of how this desire for Indigenous stories is at war with the impulse to keep our stories protected, to honour their sacredness, to tell them authentically and truthfully, regardless of outside readers’ comprehension. A tall order and one that, for years, paralysed my writing.
Aiko, the Writer is a meta narrative on a Hawaiian short story writer struggling with the same questions. In it, Aiko, who understands that her role in the literary world is “to present the Indigenous perspective”, is considering a Night Marchers-themed collection. One night as she falls asleep she is visited by her tūtū’s spirit, her ʻaumakua, as a green house gecko, who warns her: “There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand.” She must honour the kapu and “write dialogue in pidgin because dialect is important”. Things don’t work out well for Aiko, but writing the story was cathartic – I could watch Aiko navigate this tricky business, and I could learn from her mistakes.
I am conscious of the double risk of writing work that is grievously misunderstood by readers outside our experience, and of seeing my work criticised and policed by those in the very community by whom I’m trying to do right. Neverthless, I take comfort in ancestral myths and legends as shapeshifting, ungraspable. My understanding of a particular Hawaiian myth will not be an echo of its communal understanding, for ours is a culture of oral storytelling, making space for variations of embellishment, for play. Passed from speaker to speaker, ʻohana to ʻohana, our stories don’t belong to a single voice because they cannot be owned.
The greatest pleasure I derive from writing into our myths is attending to the story’s heat, its emphatic vibrations, and how they make room for my voice and my interests. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare was not my attempt at an unblemished retelling of the warring Pele and Kamapuaʻa; ultimately, it is the story of a young girl working to make peace with her body within the framework of American imperialism. In a violently colonised Hawaii, Sadie is surrounded by men who criticise her unchecked appetite. That she challenges a local superstition speaks to her fraught relationship with her culture. Tension with one’s body mirroring tension with one’s culture – this is the heat, those are the vibrations.
Since writing the collection, I have grown less interested in the question of palatability. Will white, western readers find that these stories live up to their Hawaiian fantasy? There is a mythical idealisation of the islands of Hawaii as paradise, peace in the tropics; some even call it a modern utopia. Yet this flattening of Hawaii to a postcard image divests our homeland of its culture and colour, reducing us to a place and history that is easily digestible. But we are not easily digestible, and our stories are not meant to be easy for you.
Our people have already lost so much. The recent fires on Lāhainā, Maui, have illuminated the significant wounds inflicted on the island and its people, from over-tourism to stream diversions to centuries of a devastating water crisis. In the human-made climate disaster, we lost the first royal capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. We lost hundreds of kānaka ʻōiwi (native Hawaiians). We lost historic maps, genealogical records, texts marked with the signatures of our late aliʻi. But we refuse to lose our stories, the myths that make us.
To bring these myths to life, I tilt my head toward the Koʻolaus and listen for the voice of Grams.
• Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is published by Granta (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges apply.
