“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immersed in the natural world.”
In a nuanced first full-length collection of poetry, Hawaiian-born Laurel Nakanishi unapologetically gauges the perceived complication of ethnic multiplicity in the poem “Mixed.”
“I will not hide the hollow bodies of my prairie ancestors, those wrapped up in gun-smoke out where it is never really blue or cloudless.” Then again, “And the Japanese blood? They never quite made it to America…From them: my dark hair, slim neck, but no certain turn of the eyes…In Montana, I’m not-quite-white, but white-enough.”
As for her being or not Hawaiian “enough,” she has this to say: “Although I am not Kanaka Maoli [blood Native Hawaiian] I have still been shaped by many Hawaiian teachers and values, in addition to the ecological abundance of these islands. Along with Kanaka Maoli influences, the poems have also been inspired by Hawai‘i’s multicultural heritage and my own background as a poet of multiple ethnicities.”
What a refreshing thought! That identity is not so much a “what” but a concatenation of “where’s.” The good news for extended family and larger communal lineages that get broken off, intermarried, and reformed is, “wherever you go, that’s who you are.” In an ideal world, one would also belong there and be accepted, as each generation gets reshaped around new “blood” realities blending with the old reality. And those new beings play a part, if they wish, in this syncretistic realignment, helping to preserve what may undergo significant cultural change, but does not have to get lost.
Nakanishi is such an advocate. Her nuanced answer is appreciated, valued. This poet has nothing to explain or apologize for in Ashore, her ferociously lyrical and intelligent meditation on Hawai’i, its culture, ecology, history, a poetic study imbued with a deep and passionate feel for its terrain and inhabitants, most of whom, like her, are multi-cultural. As she observes in her historical notes at book’s end, diseases brought by early explorers “resulted in the death of 70-90% of the population, after which many immigrants were brought from the Pacific rim and Asia to work in pineapple and sugar cane plantations.”
This familiar colonial scene of despoliation, a version of which was repeated throughout the New World and all over the globe for half a millennium, provides part of the energy that drives this impeccable collection. Yet the politics are particular; the poems remain eminently personal and often tender, such as her remembrance of persuading her little brother as children that a money tree existed.
“’Look, that tree has sprouted pennies,’ he says, plucking a coin from the bark crease. ‘Wow, a dime!’ I call, pointing to where I had just wedged it this morning.”
The most exquisite poems are those that caress the parts of the landscape that did not get fully blighted. In the fraught yet beautiful “Waimea Valley” sequence, Nakanishi shows the eye of a naturalist and the heart of a Buddha.
“I’ve been saving this in my mind for you—
The loulu palms with skirts of crackling leaves,
the wide net of a monkey pod tree,
the bird with a branded face and backward steps—
how she walked over the lily pads
until she sank and floated like a duck,
how bromeliads love the mango bark,
how seeds stick to the wing.”
The very next poem jars us into anti-lyric, with its sorrowful evocation of the objects that make up the massive “Pacific Trash Vortex” roughly the size of Russia. “Toothbrush, bottle cap, plastic bag bumping against our legs…everything covered with the fine down of algae, everything rotting, sea-swollen.” Even the celebration of Waimea Valley has the tang of “what remains,” given how much of Hawai’i has been irrevocably transformed and diminished, if not destroyed, by rapacious, poorly controlled tourism. The body of this poetry collection and the copious notes in the appendix never let us forget this duality, embodied in the expansive, sometimes rapturous, sometimes aggrieved, persona of Nakanishi.
Having traveled a swath of the world, she nevertheless speaks with native pride of her birthplace, the emotional locus of her childhood: “The ahupua’a where I live is Kapālama—a narrow stretch of land between the larger valleys of Nu’uanu and Kalihi. Kapālama is fed by two streams (the life force of any ahupua’a).” Spoken as a native, whether her bloodline traces all the way back to King Kāmehameha or only a few generations.
“Valley of the high priests. Sacred
Valley of Kahuna Nui, imagine the skill of their hands,
Their knowledge—the whittled point of a spear.
Waimea, the place of refuge. Waimea alive
In pohaku and iwi. Alive, Hale o Lono—
the temple for peace, for rain and harvest
and the soft rounding of creation. Alive
Ku’ula shrine for fishing the eight seas
Surrounding Hawai’i, for the seven nights
good for casting with net, hooks, lines and spears.”
This sense of local customs, such as traditional practices of fishing, are heightened by their spiritual foundations, all the way back to “the soft rounding of creation.” Creation extends forward too, as a daily act of recreation. Rhythms are natural, unforced, and the place names she lists with casual respect are comforting talismans that locate one in space and time, tipping over simultaneously into the timelessness of eternity.
Hawai’i has a specific poetic tradition, and the deeply cultivated Nakanishi has found her place within it. An essay on the roots and development of Hawaiian poetry, by the scholar Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui, is helpful in situating Nakanishi. He observes that mele (lyric poetry) makes use of metaphor, mixed assonance, imagery, and kaona (underlying meaning), all of which are common elements of both traditional Kanaka Maoli poetry, and that which contemporary poets like Nakanishi share. Each tradition implements these elements in its own way. He also notes how in “the structure of traditional Hawaiian poetry, opposites or complementary elements are often paired.” All of these elements she practices, while revitalizing that tradition, equipping it for the multicultural reality that Hawaii has long since been reckoning with.
It should come as no surprise that a different version of these lyric elements exists as well throughout Western and Asian poetry. Inevitably and felicitously, poetry is a world patrimony. Ho’omanawanui’s analysis makes clear that there exists no general disrespect for the many Hawaiian poets writing in English, the more so given the history of Hawaii, its immigration patterns, and the heavy, forced assimilation of its culture. You make a meal out of the ingredients you were given or can find. What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immersed in the natural world.
The traditional Hawaiian poetic pairing of complementary elements and the use of formulaic-ceremonial language and imagery mark the collection’s very first poem, “Invoking the Bodhisattva’s Names in Honolulu.”
“Bodhisattva of the other shore. Bodhisattva
Of the sweet come sweeping hand.
Bodhisattva of salt and small places—
of Kalihi, Kapalama, Liliha.
At the corner of School and Houghtailing St.,
Burt-guys pump gas and lean into engines.”
Both the pure mythic world and the impure contemporary one are called into simultaneous existence by the poet’s vatic apostrophe. A gas station, rather than a falling off, is simply part of what is. From the outset of Ashore, each line brims with both cosmic magnitude and low-key intimacy. This is a poetry of balance, of finding harmony amid devastation, of remembering where you came from, what was lost, but also where you are going. The root power of Kanaka Maoli mele pulses in every word. A strain of lamentation courses through this book, a righteous anger mixed with ineluctable sorrow, yet always the poet turns to the gods to placate her sufficiently, so that she may exercise wisdom, thereby endure.
“Invoking the Bodhisattvas” continues with the combined lure and lull of parallel repetition, as the poem quickens:
“Come Tahiti. Come Chuuk
Come China Come Samoa Who?
Come Japan. Come Korea
Come Philippines Come Americas Who?
Comd Portagees Come Micros
Come Buddha-heads Come Haoles.”
Tellingly, this stanza of invocation ends with “Haoles” (white foreigners). For one thing, they, and all of those named above in fact, long since came to the Hawaiian Islands. There is no calling back that bald historical fact. At the same time, the poet-speaker becomes the book’s protagonist, its guide, strongly suggesting that through the sacred wisdom of the bodhisattvas, the end of history is not a foregone conclusion. The repetition of “Who?” rings in the listener’s ears as each wave of immigrants is summoned into the historical pageant. Naming the “salt and small places” such as Kalihi, Kapalama, Liliha, suggests the wish that those places might have a different fate in store than that of the destroyed coral reefs and the masses who died of pandemics and were quarantined for life into leper colonies. What distinguishes and surprises in this collection is its ultimately hopeful tone.
Ashore offers the palatable didacticism of using skillfully the techniques of poetry to educate and enlighten us while thrilling us with the elements of mele, those proper to the poet. For Nakanishi is just as interested, for instance, in staging the myth of a woman who enters ocean waters, mates with a shark, and produces an offspring.
“The tide swirled around my hips; water tugging at my womb. Blood bloomed around me, opening small fists, dissolving metallic. He circled closer, motionless but for the fanning of his tail.”
Is this allegory? A social fable? Fascinated horror? A dream somebody had? Nakanishi is not saying. Just like Ovid, she simply lets things manifest the way they do in tales of metamorphosis. Hawaiian myth abounds in this volume, and no matter how often images of man-made wreckage appear, in the end, Ashore returns to a vision of the islands both atavistic and erudite; beautiful and dangerous. Nakanishi leaves us with a need to understand better, staging a complex historical-cultural-personal dialectic without neatly resolving it for us.
“I am braided deep among the coral heads
the angel fish
the open-mouthed eels Anemones sway
parrotfish sway tufts
and rays and jellyfish sway
bite the hook
they say take it in your mouth.”
The parenthetical placement of “they say” is subversive, showing the poet at her most adept and sly. For Nakanishi is a writer of subtlety and nuance, throughout these pages.
In P.K. Eriksson’s interview with her, “Fluid Geographies,” Nakinishi makes clear that she does not wish to be trapped within binaries, whether by herself or others.
“I find this mode of binary thinking within myself, as well, especially when I question, “Am I Asian enough? Queer enough?” and “Where do I really belong?” But no one is ever really just one thing. I believe that we are all a mix of different influences and entities, changing despite our desire to cling to one identity.”
No matter the vagaries of our ancestral tree, none of us, in the end, belong fully to one place on Earth rather than another, having washed ashore. To be human is to be a migrant, a wanderer. That being the case, we find our feet in the sand, and walk, to try to find a home in whatever place we have landed by accident, inner need, or historical circumstance. To man, woman, shark, Kanaka Maoli, Haole, Ashore is the best of guides as we resume our continuous search for self-enlightenment.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
