Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula

by Nathaniel Bright Emerson

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: ta melê], 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.

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:”