Unwritten Literature of Hawaii

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

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[Footnote 506: The scene is laid in the region about the
_Wailua_, a river on Kauai. This stream, tossed with waves
driven up from the sea, represents figuratively the
disturbance of the woman's mind at the coming of the
officers.]

[Footnote 507: _Koolau_. The name of a wind; stands for the
messengers of the king, whose instructions were to expel
(_kipaku_, verse 7) and then to slay.]

[Footnote 508: _Wa'a_. Literally canoe; stands for the woman
herself.]

[Footnote 509: _Hoa kanaka_. Human companion; is an allusion to
the bundle of her husband's bones which she carries with her,
but which are torn away and lost in the flood.]

[Footnote 510: _Mo'o-mo'o-iki_. A land at Wailua, Kauai.]

[Footnote 511: _Lua-ai-ele_. To carry about with one a sorrow.]

[Translation]

_Song_

The wind-beaten stream of Wailua
Is tossed into waves from the sea;
Salt-drenched are the leaves of the hau,
The stalks of the taro all rotted--
5 'Twas the crop of Maka'u-kiu,
The flowers of kukui are a telltale,
A messenger sped by the gale
To warn the canoe to depart.
Pray you depart!
10 Hot-foot, she's off with her pack--
A bundle red-stained with the mud--
And ghost-swift she breasts Malu-aka.
Quest follows like smoke--lost is her companion;
Fierce the wind plucks at the leaves,
15 Grabs--by mistake--her burden, the man.
Despairing, she falls to the earth,
And, hugging the hillock of sand,
Sobs out her soul on the beach Mo-mo-iki.
A tale this wrung from my heart,
20 Not told by the tongue of man.
Wrong! yet right, was I, my friend;
My love after all was for you,
While I lived a vagabond life there and here,
Sowing my vagrom tears in all roads--
25 Prompt my payment of debt to your house--
Yes, truly, I'm wrong!
[Page 257]

XLI.--THE WATER OF KANE

If one were asked what, to the English-speaking mind,
constitutes the most representative romantico-mystical
aspiration that has been embodied in song and story,
doubtless he would be compelled to answer the legend and myth
of the Holy Grail. To the Hawaiian mind the aspiration and
conception that most nearly approximates to this is that
embodied in the words placed at the head of this chapter. The
Water of Kane. One finds suggestions and hints of this
conception in many passages of Hawaiian song and story,
sometimes a phosphorescent flash, answering to the dip of the
poet's blade, sometimes crystallized into a set form; but
nowhere else than in the following mele have I found this
jewel deliberately wrought into shape, faceted, and fixed in
a distinct form of speech.

This mele comes from Kauai, the island which more than any
other of the Hawaiian group retains a tight hold on the
mystical and imaginative features that mark the mythology of
Polynesia; the island also which less than any other of the
group was dazzled by the glamour of royalty and enslaved by
the theory of the divine birth of kings.

_He Mele no Kane_

He u-i, he ninau:
He u-i aku ana au ia oe,
Aia i-hea ka wai a Kane?
Ala i ka hikina a ka La,
5 Puka i Hae-hae;[512]
Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe,
Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?
Aia i Kau-lana-ka-la,[513]
10 I ka pae opua i ke kai,[514]
Ea mai ana ma Nihoa,[515]
[Page 258] Ma ka mole mai o Lehua;
Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe,
15 Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?
Aia i ke kua-hiwi, i ke kua-lono,
I ke awawa, i ke kaha-wai;
Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe,
20 Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?
Aia i-kai, i ka moana,
I ke Kua-lau, i ke anuenue,
I ka punohu,[516] i ka ua-koko,[517]
I ka alewa-lewa;
25 Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe,
Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?
Aia i-luna ka Wai a Kane,
I ke ouli, i ke ao eleele,
30 I ke ao pano-pano,
I ke ao popolo-hua mea a Kane la, e!
Aia i-laila ka Wai a Kane.

E u-i aku ana au ia oe,
Aia i-hea ka Wai a Kane?
35 Aia i-lalo, i ka honua, i ka Wai hu,
I ka wai kau a Kane me Kanaloa--[518]
He wai-puna, he wai e inu,
He wai e mana, he wai e ola.
E ola no, e-a!

[Footnote 512: _Hae-hae_. Heaven's eastern gate; the portal in
the solid walls that supported the heavenly dome, through
which the sun entered in the morning.]

[Footnote 513: _Kau-lana-ka-la_. When the setting sun, perhaps
by an optical illusion drawn out into a boatlike form,
appeared to be floating on the surface of the ocean, the
Hawaiians named the phenomenon _Kau-lana-ka-la_--the floating
of the sun. Their fondness for personification showed itself
in the final conversion of this phrase into something like a
proper name, which they applied to the locality of the
phenomenon.]

[Footnote 514: _Pae opua i ke kai_. Another instance of
name-giving, applied to the bright clouds that seem to rest
on the horizon, especially to the west.]

[Footnote 515: _Nihoa_ (Bird island). This small rock to the
northwest of Kauai, though far below the horizon, is here
spoken of as if it were in sight.]

[Footnote 516: _Punohu_ A red luminous cloud, or a halo,
regarded as an omen portending some sacred and important
event.]

[Footnote 517: _Ua-koko_. Literally bloody rain, a term applied
to a rainbow when lying near the ground, or to a
freshet-stream swollen with the red muddy water from the wash
of the hillsides. These were important omens, claimed as
marking the birth of tabu chiefs.]

[Footnote 518: _Wai kau a Kane me Kanaloa_. Once when Kane and
Kanaloa were journeying together Kanaloa complained of
thirst. Kane thrust his staff into the pali near at hand, and
out flowed a stream of pure water that has continued to the
present day. The place is at Keanae, Maui.]

[Translation]

_The Water of Kane_

A query, a question,
I put to you:
Where is the water of Kane?
At the Eastern Gate
5 Where the Sun comes in at Hae-hae;
There is the water of Kane.

A question I ask of you:
Where is the water of Kane?
Out there with the floating Sun,
[Page 259] 10 Where cloud-forms rest on Ocean's breast,
Uplifting their forms at Nihoa,
This side the base of Lehua;
There is the water of Kane.

One question I put to you:
15 Where is the water of Kane?
Yonder on mountain peak,
On the ridges steep,
In the valleys deep,
Where the rivers sweep;
20 There is the water of Kane.

This question I ask of you:
Where, pray, is the water of Kane?
Yonder, at sea, on the ocean,
In the driving rain,
25 In the heavenly bow,
In the piled-up mist-wraith,
In the blood-red rainfall,
In the ghost-pale cloud-form;
There is the water of Kane.

30 One question I put to you:
Where, where is the water of Kane?
Up on high is the water of Kane,
In the heavenly blue,
In the black piled cloud,
35 In the black-black cloud,
In the black-mottled sacred cloud of the gods;
There is the water of Kane.

One question I ask of you:
Where flows the water of Kane?
10 Deep in the ground, in the gushing spring,
In the ducts of Kane and Loa,
A well-spring of water, to quaff,
A water of magic power--
The water of life!
45 Life! O give us this life!
[Page 260]

XLII.--GENERAL REVIEW

In this preliminary excursion into the wilderness of Hawaiian
literature we have covered but a small part of the field; we
have reached no definite boundaries; followed no stream to
its fountain head; gained no high point of vantage, from
which to survey the whole. It was indeed outside the purpose
of this book to make a delimitation of the whole field of
Hawaiian literature and to mark out its relations to the
formulated thoughts of the world.

Certain provisional conclusions, however, are clearly
indicated: that this unwritten speech-literature is but a
peninsula, a semidetached, outlying division of the
Polynesian, with which it has much in common, the whole
running back through the same lines of ancestry to the people
of Asia. There still lurk in the subliminal consciousness of
the race, as it were, vague memories of things that long ago
passed from sight and knowledge. Such, for instance, was the
_mo'o_; a word that to the Hawaiian meant a nondescript
reptile, which his imagination vaguely pictured, sometimes as
a dragonlike monster belching fire like a chimera of
mythology, or swimming the ocean like a sea-serpent, or
multiplied into a manifold pestilential swarm infesting the
wilderness, conceived of as gifted with superhuman powers and
always as the malignant foe of mankind, Now the only Hawaiian
representatives of the reptilian class were two species of
harmless lizards, so that it is not conceivable that the
Hawaiian notion of a mo'o was derived from objects present in
his island home. The word _mo'o_ may have been a coinage of
the Hawaiian speechcenter, but the thing it stood for must
have been an actual existence, like the python and cobra of
India, or the pterodactyl of a past geologic period. May we
not think of it as an ancestral memory, an impress, of
Asiatic sights and experiences?

In this connection, it will not, perhaps, lead us too far
afield, to remark that in the Hawaiian speech we find the
chisel-marks of Hindu and of Aryan scoring deep-graven. For
instance, the Hawaiian, word _pali_, cliff or precipice, is
the very word that Young-husband--following, no doubt, the
native speech of the region, the Pamirs--applies to the
mountain-walls that buttress off Tibet and the central
plateaus of Asia from northern India. Again the Hawaiian word
_mele_, which we have used so often in these chapters as to
make it seem almost like a household word, corresponds in
form, in sound, and in meaning to the Greek. [Greek: melos:
[Page 261] ta mele], lyric poetry (Liddell and Scott). Again, take the
Hawaiian word _i'a_, fish--Maori, _ika_; Malay, _ikan_; Java,
_iwa_; Bouton, _ikani_ (Edward Tregear: The Maori-Polynesian
Comparative Dictionary). Do not these words form a chain that
links the Hawaiian form to the [Greek: ichthus] of classic
Greece? The subject is fascinating, but it would soon lead us
astray. These examples must suffice.

If we can not give a full account of the tangled woodland of
Hawaiian literature, it is something to be able to report on
its fruits and the manner of men and beasts that dwelt
therein. Are its fruits good for food, or does the land we
have explored bring forth only poisonous reptiles and the
deadly upas? Is it a land in which the very principles of art
and of human nature are turned upside down? Its language the
babble of Bander-log?

This excursion into the jungle of Hawaiian literature should
at least impress us with the oneness of humanity; that its
roots and springs of action, and ours, draw their sustenance
from one and the same primeval mold; that, however far back
one may travel, he will never come to a point where he can
say this is "common or unclean;" so that he may without
defilement "kill and eat" of what the jungle provides. The
wonder is that they in Hawaii of the centuries past, shut off
by vast spaces of sea and land from our world, yet
accomplished so much.

Test the ancient Hawaiians by our own weights and measures.
The result will not be to their discredit. In practical
science, in domestic arts, in religion, in morals, in the raw
material of literature, even in the finished article--though,
unwritten--the showing would not be such as to give the
superior race cause for self-gratulation.

Another lesson--a corollary to the above--is the debt of
recognition we owe to the virtues and essential qualities of
untutored human nature itself. Imagine a portion of our own
race cut off from the thought-currents of the great world and
stranded on the island-specks of the great ocean, as the
Polynesians have been for a period of centuries that would
count back to the times of William the Conqueror or
Charlemagne, with only such outfit of the world's goods as
might survive a 3,000-mile voyage in frail canoes, reenforced
by such flotsam of the world's metallic stores as the tides
of ocean might chance to bring them--and, with such limited
capital to start with in life, what, should we judge, would
have been the outcome of the experiment in religion, in
morals, in art, in mechanics, in civilization, or in the
production of materials for literature, as compared with what
the white man found in Hawaii at its discovery in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century?

It were well to come to the study of primitive and savage
people, of nature-folk, with a mind purged of the
thanks-to-the-goodness-and-the-grace spirit.
[Page 262]
It will not do for us to brush aside contemptuously the
notions held by the Hawaiians in religion, cosmogony, and
mythology as mere heathen superstitions. If they were
heathen, there was nothing else for them to be. But even the
heathen can claim the right to be judged by their deeds, not
by their creeds. Measured by this standard, the average
heathen would not make a bad showing in comparison with the
average denizen of Christian lands. As to beliefs, how much
more defensible were the superstitions of our own race two or
three centuries ago, or of to-day, than those of the
Hawaiians? How much less absurd and illogical were our
notions of cosmogony, of natural history; how much less
beneficent, humane, lovable the theology of the pagan
Hawaiians than of our Christian ancestors a few centuries ago
if looked at from an ethical or practical point of view. At
the worst, the Hawaiian sacrificed the enemy he took in
battle on the altar of his gods; the Christian put to death
with exquisite torture those who disagreed with him in points
of doctrine. And when it comes to morals, have not the
heathen time and again demonstrated their ability to give
lessons in self-restraint to their Christian invaders?

It is a matter of no small importance in the rating of a
people to take account of their disposition toward nature. If
there has been a failure to appreciate truly the mental
attitude of the "savage," and especially of the Polynesian
savage, the Hawaiian, toward the book of truth that was open
to him in nature, it is always in order to correct it. That
such a mistake has been made needs no further proof than the
perusal of the following passage in a book entitled "History
of the Sandwich Islands:"

To the heathen the book of nature is a sealed book. Where
the word of God is not, the works of God fail either to
excite admiration or to impart instruction. The Sandwich
Islands present some of the sublimest scenery on earth,
but to an ignorant native--to the great mass of the people
in entire heathenism--it has no meaning. As one crested
billow after another of the heaving ocean rolls in and
dashes upon the unyielding rocks of an iron-bound coast,
which seems to say, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no
farther," the low-minded heathen is merely thinking of the
shellfish on the shore. As he looks up to the everlasting
mountains, girt with clouds and capped with snow, he
betrays no emotion. As he climbs a towering cliff, looks
down a yawning precipice, or abroad upon a forest of deep
ravines, immense rocks, and spiral mountains thrown
together in the utmost wildness and confusion by the might
of God's volcanoes, he is only thinking of some roots in
the wilderness that may be good for food.

There is hardly a poem in this volume that does not show the
utter falsity of this view. The writer of the words quoted
above, now in his grave for more than sixty years, was a man
for whose purity and moral character one must entertain the
highest esteem. He enjoyed the very best opportunity to study
the minds of the "heathen" about him, to discern their
[Page 263] thoughts, to learn at first hand their emotions toward the
natural world, whether of admiration, awe, reverence, or
whether their attitude was that of blank indifference and
absorption in selfish things. But he utterly failed to
penetrate the mystery, the "truth and poetry," of the
Hawaiian mind and heart. Was it because he was tied to a
false theology and a false theory of human nature? We are not
called upon to answer this question. Let others say what was
wrong in his standpoint. The object of this book is not
controversial; but when a palpable injustice has been done,
and is persisted in by people of the purest motives, as to
the thoughts, emotions, and mental operations of the
"savage," and as to the finer workings within that constitute
the furniture and sanctuary of heart and soul, it is
imperative to correct so grave a mistake; and we may be sure
that he whose words have just been quoted, were he living
today, would acknowledge his error.

Though it is not the purpose of these pages to set forth in
order a treatise on the human nature of the "savage," or to
make unneeded apology for the primitive and uncultured races
of mankind in general, or for the Hawaiian in particular, yet
it is no small satisfaction to be able to set in array
evidence from the life and thoughts of the savages themselves
that shall at least have a modifying influence upon our views
on these points.

The poetry of ancient Hawaii evinces a deep and genuine love
of nature, and a minute, affectionate, and untiring
observation of her moods, which it would be hard to find
surpassed in any literature. Her poets never tired of
depicting nature; sometimes, indeed, their art seems
heaven-born. The mystery, beauty, and magnificence of the
island world appealed profoundly to their souls; in them the
ancient Hawaiian found the image of man the embodiment of
Deity; and their myriad moods and phases were for him an
inexhaustible spring of joy, refreshment, and delight.

GLOSSARY

The study of Hawaiian pronunciation is mainly a study of vowel sounds
and of accent. Each written vowel represents at least two related
sounds.

A (_ah_) has the Italian sound found in f_a_ther, as in h_a_-le or in
L_a_-ka; also a short sound like that of a in li_a_ble, as in
ke-_a_-ke-_a_, to contradict, or in _a_-ha, an assembly.

E (_a_) has the sound of long a in f_a_te, or of e in pr_e_y, without
the i-glide that follows, as in the first syllable of P_e_-le, or of
m_e_-a, a thing; also the short sound of e in n_e_t, as in _e_-ha, hurt,
or in p_e_a, a sail.

I (_ee_) has the long sound of i in p_i_que, or in pol_i_ce, as in
_i_-li, skin, or in h_i_-la-h_i_-la, shame; also the short sound of i in
h_i_ll, as in l_i_-hi, border, and in _i_-ki, small.

O (_oh_) has the long sound of o in n_o_te or in _o_ld, without the
u-glide, as in l_o_-a, long, or as in the first syllable of L_o_-no;
also a short sound, which approximates to that sometimes erroneously
given to the vowel in c_o_at, as in p_o_-po, rotten, or as in l_o_-ko, a
lake.

U (_oo_) has the long sound of u in r_u_le, as in h_u_-la, to dance; and
a short sound approximating to that of u in f_u_ll, as in m_u_-ku, cut
off.

Every Hawaiian syllable ends in a vowel. No attempt has been made to
indicate these differences of vowel sound. The only diacritical marks
here employed are the acute accent for stressed syllables and the
apostrophe between two vowels to indicate the glottic closure or
interruption of sound (improperly sometimes called a guttural) that
prevents the two from coalescing.

In the seven diphthongs _ae_, _ai_, _ao_, _au_, _ei_, _ia_, and _ua_ a
delicate ear will not fail to detect a coalescence of at least two
sounds, thus proving them not to be mere digraphs.

In animated description or pathetic narrative, or in the effort to
convey the idea of length, or height, or depth, or immensity, the
Hawaiian had a way of prolonging the vowel sounds of a word, as if by so
doing he could intimate the amplitude of his thought.

The letter w (_way_) represents two sounds, corresponding to our w and
our v. At the beginning of a word it has the sound of w (_way_),
retaining this even when the word has become compounded. This is
illustrated in _Wai_-a-lu-a (geographical name), and _w_a-ha mouth. In
the middle of a word, or after the first syllable, it almost always has
the sound of v (_vay_), as in he-_w_a (wrong), and in E-_w_a
(geographical name). In ha-_w_a-_w_a (awkward), the compound word
ha-_w_ai (water-pipe), and several others the w takes the _way_ sound.

The great majority of Hawaiian words are accented on the penult, and in
simple words of four or more syllables there is, as a rule, an accent on
the fourth and on the sixth syllables, counting back from the final
syllable, as in la-na-ki-la (victorious) and as in ho-o-ko-lo-ko-lo (to
try at law).

_Aha_, (a-ha)--a braided cord of sinet; an assembly; a prayer or
religious service (note a, p. 20).

_Ahaaina_ (a-ha-ai-na)--a feast.

_Ai_ (ai, as in aisle)--vegetable food; to eat; an event in a game or
contest (p. 93).

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