There are two distinctly competing versions of this story. Both are equally true. In both stories, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I have just returned home to Kaua’i – the northwestern-most Island in the Hawaiian archipelago – after more than a year on the American continent. In both versions we loved touring the U.S. with our new book and in both versions we were yearning for home. In the first version: last Thursday, we put up our great-in-the-rain-and-cold, but less-great-in-the-tropical-heat donated German tent. It is our fourteenth tent in thirteen years without a house on the beaches of Hawai’i.
In early April we met the editor of a Virginia business magazine over lunch in Roanoke, Virginia. Unexpectedly, three full months later - on the very day we arrived home to Hawai'i - this book review greeted us. We thought we'd share it.
Like all good stories, this one has a beginning, middle, and an end. After thirteen years writing and rewriting, drafting and re-drafting, Grandmothers Whisper found its miraculous way to a bound book that could actually be held in your hands (or alternatively downloaded onto your Kindle) just last Thanksgiving.
There is nothing more humbling (or exciting) than attendance, in one short and compressed week at: the international Book Expo of America; the Jewish Book Council's kick-off of their nationwide authors' tour; the Flying Eagle Woman's Fund annualcelebration of women who have powerfully contributed to justice for indigenouspeoples. Nothing at all like the week that 'Iokepa and I (and the book, Grandmothers Whisper) just experienced.
I was born on Mothers’ Day, the much valued daughter after two sons. Mothers’ Day has always had a resonance to my little family. It is a terribly long distance from the Hawaiian Island that ‘Iokepa and I call home to the places where my sons and mother call home – six thousand miles to be exact. But this year, by happenstance, we landed in Baltimore (between a book signing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and a scheduled speech in New York City). I was able to share Mothers’ Day across three generations with my ninety-nine-year-old mother and my thirty-year-old, first-born son.
The material and successful life that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani surrendered fourteen years ago - to take up arms (heart and soul) against the deception, the greed, and the oppression visited upon his people and his nation - included a house on a lake, seven cars “and a hot rod.” Despite the fact that his lavish passion in these last years has been cultural - language, history and spiritual practice - for the first forty-six years of his life focused an equal dose of passion on cars that go very fast.
It looked something like this. 'Iokepa and I had just had an enormously successful Grandmothers Whisper book reading and discussion at the Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota the night before. We had a free day before the next book event on the Ojibwa Reservation in Grand Portage. We decided to do that rare thing for us: be tourists for a single day.
I’ll admit it upfront. Last week, I had no idea whether a 'podcast' was: animal, vegetable, or mineral? This week, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I were participants (?) subjects (?) occupants (?) of one.
It is just a few days before Christmas 2010. And it is also exactly thirteen years since this remarkable convoluted journey began for me. The first words of the firstparagraph of thefirst chapter of the newly released book, Grandmothers Whisper read.
It is impossible to travel as ‘Iokepa and I do – from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Washington State to Washington, D.C. – and not notice the differences. I am not speaking about mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, prairies, and deserts. It’s the human differences – the face of a place. I’m speaking of the angles and planes of the human face – and I am speaking of the human temperament of a place. They aredifferent. We are at this moment among the cool, reserved New England faces. They are lovely and angular and they are comforting to me.
For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat. And yes, it’s been a record-setting 100 degrees in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity. But yesterday I realized, that is not it – not my problem at all. Allow me to explain. My oldest brother is a professional man. He was the apple of my father’s eye. My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child,” tried harder. He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.
Exactly two years before the Camry met its fate, we crossed the width of the continent in that black Toyota with the gold wheels in four weeks. On that particular crossing: we had dinner with a saintly, eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest in Portland, Oregon; we had high tea with a Japanese Buddhist. We stayed in the home of the eldest of eight siblings in a Mormon family that traces its roots to the earliest church founders. In Missouri, we broke bread and bared souls with a Unity minister – a woman whose heart is as open as the roads we traversed across Nebraska.
At the end of almost every Return Voyage gathering in these past years, well-intentioned folks have asked ‘Iokepa: “What can I do to help?”
He answers: “When you hear that things are changing on the Hawaiian Islands – and you will – I ask that you offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people.”
This is the story of trust, faith, and the powerful support that accrues when we agree to use our unique gifts, our best natures, and take the path ofgreatest good--to fulfill our life's purpose. Every one of us has one. Our task, really, is to find it--and then, fearlessly, to live it. For thirteen years now, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has actively reclaimed his aboriginal Hawaiian history, language and culture. He has (at his ancestors' insistence) carried not a scrap of paper that might confuse his native identity with an American one. That has meant, of course, he carries no American driver's license, uses no social security number.
For every memorable year of my adult lifetime, I have had just one recurring and terrifying nightmare. In that dream, I am running for my life from a rapidly approaching, formidable wall of water that I cannot outrun. I am absolutely certain that it will overtake me. Ironically, for every memorable year of my adult lifetime, in all of my many domestic and foreign homes, I have never lived anywhere near that possibility. I never once lived on the edge of an ocean – until I met ‘Iokepa, and moved my life to these Hawaiian Islands.
The very first American Court House erected on the Island of Kaua’i was built in 1837, with complete awareness and intention on the top of the bulldozed ruins of what was the oldest heiau on this Island.
Heiau were (and those that remain are) sacred stone enclosures for Native Hawaiian ritual and spiritual practice, prayer and ceremony. Every heiau was built in alignment with the planets and the stars – with an ancient people’s sophisticated awareness of the night sky. Each heiau sat within full view of the ocean horizon.
It’s Thanksgiving Day; ‘Iokepa is threatened with jail. The challenge of Return Voyage, always and only moved by ancestral guidance, intensifies. In the long, deep, ubiquitous story of freedom denied, of national identity obliterated, of oppression institutionalized – there have been wars waged, anger and violence righteously uncorked against oppressors.
This is the insistent (seldom kindly spoken) challenge that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani hears whenever he dares to speak of the future of the Native Hawaiian people – or of their nation. The implied conclusion is: these people would not know what to do with their sovereignty. The implied assertion: deny them that choice. ‘Iokepa answers the question in a larger way.
We live in a noisy world. We have coming at us in any given moment: telephones that no longer sit quietly next to our bed or on our office desks (they now follow our every step into movie theaters, churches, and romantic dinners with our lover); mail that no longer comes once a day on the eagerly awaited footsteps of our postman (now it beeps its electronic announcement night, day, and every moment between); news that no longer slaps at our doorstep at dawn or arrives from Walter Cronkite’s lips at dusk (it comes at us 24/7 from so many contrary and irritating voices that it’s hard to know whom to trust).
I've been a writer my entire life, a professional writer since I left college at twenty-two, and an author since I was forty. In that time, I have naturally watched my writing evolve: from eighteen years of salaried newspaper and magazine journalism to the less financially predictable, but ultimately more emotionally satisfying occupation of writing books. Sometimes those books have been well-published, turned into feature films, sold around the globe in translation; sometimes not. Writing for myself on occasion meant writing only for myself. But that was the nature of the beast.
