Unwritten Literature of Hawaii

N >> Nathaniel Bright Emerson >> Unwritten Literature of Hawaii

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[Illustration
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
BULLETIN 38 PLATE I
FEMALE DANCING IN HULA COSTUME]

[Page 1]

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY

BULLETIN 38

UNWRITTEN LITERATURE
OF HAWAII
THE SACRED SONGS OF THE HULA

COLLECTED AND TRANSLATED, WITH
NOTES AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE HULA
BY NATHANIEL B. EMERSON, A.M., M.D.

WASHINGTON

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

1909

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PREFATORY NOTE

Previous to the year 1906 the researches of the Bureau were
restricted to the American Indians, but by act of Congress
approved June 30 of that year the scope of its operations was
extended to include the natives of the Hawaiian islands.
Funds were not specifically provided, however, for
prosecuting investigations among these people, and in the
absence of an appropriation for this purpose it was
considered inadvisable to restrict the systematic
investigations among the Indian tribes in order that the new
field might be entered. Fortunately the publication of
valuable data pertaining to Hawaii is already provided for,
and the present memoir by Doctor Emerson is the first of the
Bureau's Hawaiian series. It is expected that this Bulletin
will be followed shortly by one comprising an extended list
of works relating to Hawaii, compiled by Prof. H.M. Ballou
and Dr. Cyrus Thomas.

W.H. HOLMES,

_Chief._

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CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 7

I. The hula 11

II. The halau; the kuahu--their decoration and consecration 14

III. The gods of the hula 23

IV. Support and organization of the hula 26

V. Ceremonies of graduation; debut of a hula dancer 31

VI. The password--the song of admission 38

VII. Worship at the altar of the halau 42

VIII. Costume of the hula dancer 49

IX. The hula ala'a-papa 57

X. The hula pa-ipu, or kuolo 73

XI. The hula ki'i 91

XII. The hula pahu 103

XIII. The hula uliuli 107

XIV. The hula puili 113

XV. The hula ka-laau 116

XVI. The hula ili-ili 120

XVII. The hula kaekeeke 122

XVIII. An intermission 126

XIX. The hula niau-kani 132

XX. The hula ohe 135

XXI. The music and musical instruments of the Hawaiians 138

XXII. Gesture 176

XXIII. The hula pa-hua 183

XXIV. The hula Pele 186

XXV, The hula pa'i-umauma 202

XXVI. The hula ku'i Molokai 207

XXVII. The hula kielei 210

XXVIII. The hula mu'u-mu'u 212

XXIX. The hula kolani 216

XXX. The hula kolea 219

XXXI. The hula mano 221

XXXII. The hula ilio 223

XXXIII. The hula pua'a 228

XXXIV. The hula ohelo 233

XXXV. Thehula kilu 235

XXXVI. The hula hoonana 244

XXXVII. The hula ulili 246

XXXVIII. The hula o-niu 248

XXXIX. The hula ku'i 250

XL. The oli 254

XLI. The water of Kane 257

XLII. General review 260

Glossary 265

Index 271

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Page
PLATE I. Female dancing in hula costume Frontispiece
II. Ie-ie (Freycinetia arnotti) leaves and fruit 19
III. Hala-pepe (Dracaena aurea) 24
IV. Maile (Alyxia myrtillifolia) wreath 32
V. Ti (Dracaena terminalis) 44
VI. Ilima (Sida fallax), lei and flowers 56
VII. Ipu hula, gourd drum 73
VIII. Marionettes (Maile-pakaha, Nihi-au-moe) 91
IX. Marionette (Maka-ku) 93
X. Pahu hula, hula drum 103
XI. Uli-uli, a gourd rattle 107
XII. Hawaiian tree-snails (Achatinella) 120
XIII. Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) flowers and
leaves 126
XIV. Hawaiian trumpet, pu (Cassis madagascarensis) 131
XV. Woman playing on the nose-flute (ohe-hano-ihu) 135
XVI. Pu-niu, a drum 142
XVII. Hawaiian musician playing on the uku-lele 164
XVIII. Hala fruit bunch and drupe with a "lei" 170
XIX. Pu (Triton tritonis) 172
XX. Phyllodia and true leaves of the koa
(Acacia koa) 181
XXI. Pala-palai ferns 194
XXII. Awa-puhi, a Hawaiian ginger 210
XXIII. Hinano hala 235
XXIV. Lady dancing the hula ku'i 250
FIGURE 1. Puili, bamboo rattle 113
2. Ka, drumstick for pu-niu 142
3. Ohe-hano-ihu, nose-flute 145

MUSICAL PIECES

I. Range of the nose-flute--Elsner 146
II. Music from the nose-flute--Elsner 146
III. The _ukeke_ (as played by Keaonaloa)--Eisner 149
IV. Song from the hula pa'i-umauma--Berger 153
V. Song from the hula pa-ipu--Berger 153
VI. Song for the hula Pele--Berger 154
VII. Oli and mele from the hula ala'a-papa--Yarndley 156
VIII. _He Inoa no Kamehameha_--Byington 162
IX. Song, _Poli Anuanu_--Yarndley 164
X. Song, _Hua-hua'i_--Yarndley 166
XI. Song, _Ka Mawae_--Berger 167
XII. Song, _Like no a Like_--Berger 168
XIII. Song, _Pili Aoao_--Berger 169
XIV. _Hawaii Ponoi_--Berger 172

[Page 7]

INTRODUCTION

This book is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian
songs and poetic pieces that have done service from time
immemorial as the stock supply of the _hula_. The descriptive
portions have been added, not because the poetical parts
could not stand by themselves, but to furnish the proper
setting and to answer the questions of those who want to
know.

Now, the hula stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it
was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our
opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of
social enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal
imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past.
The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of
inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that
celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess Pele and her
compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we
find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of
composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This
epic[1] of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of
poems forming a story addressed not to the closet-reader, but
to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and
people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy
par excellence, was the _oli_; but it must be noted that in
every species of Hawaiian poetry, _mele_--whether epic or
eulogy or prayer, sounding through them all we shall find the
lyric note.

[Footnote 1: It might be termed a handful of lyrics strung on
an epic thread.]

The most telling record of a people's intimate life is the
record which it unconsciously makes in its songs. This record
which the Hawaiian people have left of themselves is full and
specific. When, therefore, we ask what emotions stirred the
heart of the old-time Hawaiian as he approached the great
themes of life and death, of ambition and jealousy, of sexual
passion, of romantic love, of conjugal love, and parental
love, what his attitude toward nature and the dread forces of
earthquake and storm, and the mysteries of spirit and the
hereafter, we shall find our answer in the songs and prayers
and recitations of the hula.

The hula, it is true, has been unfortunate in the mode and
manner of its introduction to us moderns. An institution of
divine, that is, religious, origin, the hula in modern times
[Page 8] has wandered so far and fallen so low that foreign and
critical esteem has come to associate it with the riotous and
passionate ebullitions of Polynesian kings and the amorous
posturing of their voluptuaries. We must make a just
distinction, however, between the gestures and bodily
contortions presented by the men and women, the actors in the
hula, and their uttered words. "The voice is Jacob's voice,
but the hands are the hands of Esau." In truth, the actors in
the hula no longer suit the action to the word. The utterance
harks back to the golden age; the gesture is trumped up by
the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the
hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is ofttimes a
sealed casket.
Whatever indelicacy attaches in modern times to some of the
gestures and contortions of the hula dancers, the old-time
hula songs in large measure were untainted with grossness. If
there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible
for true reports of the doings and sayings of the Polynesians
to reach us from that happy land--reports of their joys and
sorrows, their love-makings and their jealousies, their
family spats and reconciliations, their worship of beauty and
of the gods and goddesses who walked in the garden of
beauty--we may say, I think, that such a report would be in
substantial agreement with the report that is here offered;
but, if one's virtue will not endure the love-making of
Arcadia, let him banish the myth from his imagination and hie
to a convent or a nunnery.

If this book does nothing more than prove that savages are
only children of a younger growth than ourselves, that what
we find them to have been we ourselves--in our
ancestors--once were, the labor of making it will have been
not in vain'.

For an account of the first hula we may look to the story of
Pele. On one occasion that goddess begged her sisters to
dance and sing before her, but they all excused themselves,
saying they did not know the art. At that moment in came
little Hiiaka, the youngest and the favorite. Unknown to her
sisters, the little maiden had practised the dance under the
tuition of her friend, the beautiful but ill-fated Hopoe.
When banteringly invited to dance, to the surprise of all,
Hiiaka modestly complied. The wave-beaten sand-beach was her
floor, the open air her hall; Feet and hands and swaying form
kept time to her improvisation:

Look, Puna is a-dance in the wind;
The palm groves of Kea-au shaken.
Haena and the woman Hopoe dance and sing
On the beach Nana-huki,
A dance of purest delight,
Down by the sea Nana-huki.

The nature of this work has made it necessary to use
occasional Hawaiian words in the technical parts. At their
[Page 9] first introduction it has seemed fitting that they should be
distinguished by italics; but, once given the entree, it is
assumed that, as a rule, they will be granted the rights of
free speech without further explanation.

A glossary, which explains all the Hawaiian words used in the
prose text, is appended. Let no one imagine, however, that by
the use of this little crutch alone he will be enabled to
walk or stumble through the foreign ways of the simplest
Hawaiian _mele_. Notes, often copious, have been appended to
many of the mele, designed to exhaust neither the subject nor
the reader, but to answer some of the questions of the
intelligent thinker.

Thanks, many thanks, are due, first, to those native
Hawaiians who have so far broken with the old superstitious
tradition of concealment as to unearth so much of the
unwritten literary wealth stored in Hawaiian memories;
second, to those who have kindly contributed criticism,
suggestion, material at the different stages of this book's
progress; and, lastly, to those dear friends of the author's
youth--living or dead--whose kindness has made it possible to
send out this fledgling to the world. The author feels under
special obligations to Dr. Titus Munson Coan, of New York,
for a painstaking revision of the manuscript.

HONOLULU, HAWAII.

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LITERATURE OF HAWAII

By NATHANIEL B. EMERSON

I.--THE HULA

One turns from the study of old genealogies, myths, and
traditions of the Hawaiians with a hungry despair at finding
in them means so small for picturing the people themselves,
their human interests and passions; but when it comes to the
hula and the whole train of feelings and sentiments that made
their entrances and exits in the _halau_ (the hall of the
hula) one perceives that in this he has found the door to the
heart of the people. So intimate and of so simple confidence
are the revelations the people make of themselves in their
songs and prattlings that when one undertakes to report what
he has heard and to translate into the terms of modern speech
what he has received in confidence, as it were, he almost
blushes, as if he had been guilty of spying on Adam and Eve
in their nuptial bower. Alas, if one could but muffle his
speech with the unconscious lisp of infancy, or veil and tone
his picture to correspond to the perspective of antiquity, he
might feel at least that, like Watteau, he had dealt
worthily, if not truly, with that ideal age which we ever
think of as the world's garden period.

The Hawaiians, it is true, were many removes from being
primitives; their dreams, however, harked back to a period
that was close to the world's infancy. Their remote ancestry
was, perhaps, akin to ours--Aryan, at least Asiatic--but the
orbit of their evolution seems to have led them away from the
strenuous discipline that has whipped the Anglo-Saxon branch
into fighting shape with fortune.

If one comes to the study of the hula and its songs in the
spirit of a censorious moralist he will find nothing for him;
if as a pure ethnologist, he will take pleasure in pointing
out the physical resemblances of the Hawaiian dance to the
languorous grace of the Nautch girls, of the geisha, and
other oriental dancers. But if he comes as a student and
lover of human nature, back of the sensuous posturings, in
the emotional language of the songs he will find himself
entering the playground of the human race.

The hula was a religious service, in which poetry, music,
pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of
[Page 12] dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of
life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of
those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the
earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods.
As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the
bowels of the old-time mythology into cords through which the
race maintained vital connection with its mysterious past.
Interwoven with these, forming the woof, were threads of a
thousand hues and of many fabrics, representing the
imaginations of the poet, the speculations of the
philosopher, the aspirations of many a thirsty soul, as well
as the ravings and flame-colored pictures of the sensualist,
the mutterings and incantations of the _kahuna_, the
mysteries and paraphernalia of Polynesian mythology, the
annals of the nation's history--the material, in fact, which
in another nation and under different circumstances would
have gone to the making of its poetry, its drama, its opera,
its literature.

The people were superstitiously religious; one finds their
drama saturated with religious feeling, hedged about with
tabu, loaded down with prayer and sacrifice. They were
poetical; nature was full of voices for their ears; their
thoughts came to them as images; nature was to them an
allegory; all this found expression in their dramatic art.
They were musical; their drama must needs be cast in forms to
suit their ideas of rhythm, of melody, and of poetic harmony.
They were, moreover, the children of passion, sensuous,
worshipful of whatever lends itself to pleasure. How, then,
could the dramatic efforts of this primitive people, still in
the bonds of animalism, escape the note of passion? The songs
and other poetic pieces which have come down to us from the
remotest antiquity are generally inspired with a purer
sentiment and a loftier purpose than the modern; and it may
be said of them all that when they do step into the mud it is
not to tarry and wallow in it; it is rather with the
unconscious naivete of a child thinking no evil.

On the principle of "the terminal conversion of opposites,"
which the author once heard an old philosopher expound, the
most advanced modern is better able to hark back to the
sweetness and light and music of the primeval world than the
veriest wigwam-dweller that ever chipped an arrowhead. It is
not so much what the primitive man can give us as what we can
find in him that is worth our while. The light that a Goethe,
a Thoreau, or a Kipling can project into Arcadia is mirrored
in his own nature.

If one mistakes not the temper and mind of this generation,
we are living in an age that is not content to let perish one
seed of thought or one single phase of life that can be
rescued from the drift of time. We mourn the extinction of
the buffalo of the plains and of the birds of the islands,
[Page 13] rightly thinking that life is somewhat less rich and full
without them. What of the people of the plains and of the
islands of the sea? Is their contribution so nothingless that
one can affirm that the orbit of man's mind is complete
without it?

Comparison is unavoidable between the place held by the dance
in ancient Hawaii and that occupied by the dance in our
modern society. The ancient Hawaiians did not personally and
informally indulge in the dance for their own amusement, as
does pleasure-loving society at the present time. Like the
Shah of Persia, but for very different reasons, Hawaiians of
the old time left it to be done for them by a body of trained
and paid performers. This was not because the art and
practice of the hula were held in disrepute--quite the
reverse--but because the hula was an accomplishment requiring
special education and arduous training in both song and
dance, and more especially because it was a religious matter,
to be guarded against profanation by the observance of tabus
and the performance of priestly rites.

This fact, which we find paralleled in every form of communal
amusement, sport, and entertainment in ancient Hawaii, sheds
a strong light on the genius of the Hawaiian. We are wont to
think of the old-time Hawaiians as light-hearted children of
nature, given to spontaneous outbursts of song and dance as
the mood seized them; quite as the rustics of "merrie
England" joined hands and tripped "the light fantastic toe"
in the joyous month of May or shouted the harvest home at a
later season. The genius of the Hawaiian was different. With
him the dance was an affair of premeditation, an organized
effort, guarded by the traditions of a somber religion. And
this characteristic, with qualifications, will be found to
belong to popular Hawaiian sport and amusement of every
variety. Exception must be made, of course, of the
unorganized sports of childhood. One is almost inclined to
generalize and to say that those children of nature, as we
are wont to call them, in this regard were less free and
spontaneous than the more advanced race to which we are proud
to belong. But if the approaches to the temple of Terpsichore
with them were more guarded, we may confidently assert that
their enjoyment therein was deeper and more abandoned.

[Page 14]

II.--THE HALAU; THE KUAHU--THEIR DECORATION
AND CONSECRATION

THE HALAU

In building a halau, or hall, in which to perform the hula a
Hawaiian of the old, old time was making a temple for his
god. In later and degenerate ages almost any structure would
serve the purpose; it might be a flimsy shed or an
extemporaneous _lanai_ such as is used to shelter that _al
fresco_ entertainment, the _luau_. But in the old times of
strict tabu and rigorous etiquette, when the chief had but to
lift his hand and the entire population of a district
ransacked plain, valley, and mountain to collect the poles,
beams, thatch, and cordstuff; when the workers were so
numerous that the structure grew and took shape in a day, we
may well believe that ambitious and punctilious patrons of
the hula, such as La'a, Liloa, or Lono-i-ka-makahiki, did not
allow the divine art of Laka to house in a barn.

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