AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Land is the Center

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Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Land is the Center.

When you read about the history of Hawaii, it’s funny how suddenly the passive voice seems to be the only way to form a sentence. It usually goes something like this: What happened in Hawaii—with no mention of who actually did those things—was, first, diseases were introduced, measles, smallpox, venereal disease, wiping out over 80% of Native Hawaiians. Then the ecosystem was destroyed, eaten up by imported cattle, crowded out by non-native plants, cut, sold, burned, you name it. Hawaiian culture was next, language, mythology, song, social customs, all Americanized. What happened after that? The Queen was imprisoned, the constitutional monarchy overthrown, Hawaii was declared a US territory, and finally a US state. Not that it ended there. I have to mention decades more of land grabs, the ever-expanding US military presence, the continued pollution of the soil and water, not to mention the slightly overwhelming fact that tourists on Hawaii outnumber people who actually live there by almost 8 to 1.

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What you don’t often hear about is active resistance. Like that song you hear in the background? That was something Queen Liliʻuokalani wrote for her people while imprisoned, even though she wasn’t allowed to communicate with them, and was not allowed access to her musical instruments. Three quarters of a century later, you had the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. One of the leaders of the movement was the Indigenous writer, activist, and poet Haunani-Kay Trask, who fought not just to rid Hawaii of the US occupation, but also poured her heart and soul into recovering, protecting, and teaching centuries of Hawaiian culture.

Haunani-Kay Trask died last summer, but her example inspired more than one generation of activists and artists. One of those artists is the poet and performance artist Noʻu Revilla, who changed the whole direction of her life after she came across Haunani-Kay Trask’s writing. Revilla just published her debut poetry collection, Ask the Brindled, but before we got to her poetry, I asked her about the moment she found Haunani.

Noʻu Revilla: So I was attending NYU, and I was majoring in journalism. (LAUGHS) I mean, there’s nothing—I mean, journalism is a very important career. Our journalists are important. But it’s such a, you know, it’s so different from the life I live now. And I wanted to make my life in New York. From when I was little, that was where you made shit happen. And my mother hated it here. She dropped me off, and she was just like, “I hate this city. Everyone is just, you know, in their own little cloud.” And, you know, anonymity is really the name of the game here until you work your way up whoever’s ladder, ladder with a capital L. And I loved that. I, you know, at that time, I just, “No, I’m going to keep my head down, I’m going to work hard.” And then I had this wonderful writing class that asked us to write a review of a book of essays. And because I am utterly devoted to libraries, I was just kind of waltzing through the library, like you do, and I literally found her on the bottom shelf in Bobst Library. It was From a Native Daughter. And I pulled it out, and it’s her collection of essays, and it’s a phenomenal iconic text here in Hawaii, across the globe for anyone studying, you know, indigenous feminism or decolonization, sovereignty movements, you are reading this book, you have read this book. I open it up and there’s this essay called “From a Native Daughter.” And in it, she talks about, you know, I had to put all these things down and go out into the āina and put my hands into the ground. I had to plant something. I had to learn Hawaiian language. And then I’m reading her, and she has such tenderness, and yet, you flip the page and she has the most incredible ferocity because she knows how to protect her people. She wants to protect her people. And the capacity she demonstrated for rage and rapture in the same voice. And it was all dedicated to the aloha she has for our country, for our people, for our vitality. I had never seen anything like that in my life! And she was unapologetically feminist. And all the parts of me I thought did not belong, I saw in her. Then I found her poetry and it was over. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing. So that was that for your journalism career, basically?

Noʻu Revilla: Oh, that was (LAUGHS), it was done.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And at that time, because you mentioned the word “āina”, which I would describe as “land”, but it has a whole cloud of other meanings. So maybe can you tell me a little bit about that, what that word or that concept meant to you at the time and how you’ve come to understand and live it since?

Noʻu Revilla: So, one of the things that was very important for me and what I found to be quite generous on her part was, she included a glossary in her books, both her poetry collections and her book of essays. And as a Hawaiian woman who did not grow up speaking or learning Hawaiian, who was not rewarded institutionally to invest in my own culture, when I found her book, it was exhilarating. It touched parts of me that were intuitive and ancestral, but I didn’t know what she meant when she would refer to niu, you know, our word for “coconut” or ʻulu, our word for “breadfruit”, and all these different things. And then she would have these notes. And a glossary. And so, her glossary of course contained translations of Hawaiian language. But also she would have these small notes in her poetry collection that offered context for her politics, right, particularly when it came to decolonization and sovereignty for Hawaii. And as a woman in diaspora, as a Hawaiian woman who didn’t know the language, it was just a gift. Like, it was such a way of her embracing us instead of rejecting us. It was you, you, you, and you, come home, we have a movement. You belong home. Come home, all of you. So āina is very expansive and it’s very inclusive. A common way of expressing that word in English is “that which feeds”, and will not usually be limited to land. It is also an expression of your freshwater and your ocean. So that which feeds. And Aloha ʻĀina is our expression of, you know, love of, love of the land and lover of land, protector of land. Aloha ʻĀina is a practice, it’s a responsibility, it’s a sphere of privilege. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, then you moved from New York to Hawaii. How did that happen?

Noʻu Revilla: So I don’t know if you know this. You probably do. NYU is a very expensive institution. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Noʻu Revilla: And I was mostly able to be there financially because I had a scholarship that supported Native Hawaiian students. But the government decided that my scholarship was prejudiced because it supported Hawaiian students only. So, this incredibly generous scholarship that I earned was taken away from me.

Helena de Groot: Wow.