At the gateways of the day

by Padraic Colum

I learned something of the language; I sought out those who still had the tradition of Hawaiian romance and who could recite it in the traditional way; I made a study of all the material that had been collected; I placed myself in the hands of the very distinguished group of Polynesian scholars that is in Honolulu. Quite early in my researches I came to the conclusion that my work should be based on the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, published by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, in Honolulu, and I made it my main task to understand the background of the stories given in that collection, and to hear as many of them as possible from the lips of the surviving custodians of the Polynesian tradition in Hawaii.

I found in the Hawaiian Islands conditions that are lamentably like the conditions in certain European countries where separate and interesting cultures are being pushed aside by this or that culture that is politically and commercially important. In Hawaii there is a great breach in the native tradition: I have been in houses where a grandmother or grandfather knew traditional Hawaiian poems (mele) and could chant them in the traditional way, while a son or daughter would be able to translate them, but not able to chant them, and a grandchild would be able neither to chant the poems nor translate them. Once, I remember, in such a house, I went to see what a little girl, [[xviii]]the granddaughter of a lady who had chanted mele to me for about an hour, was studying. This child had not allowed herself to be interrupted either by the chanting of her grandmother or by the translating that her father did for me; she was bent on mastering a lesson in a book that she kept before her—an American school geography. “Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, Vienna is the capital of Austria,” was one of the items that had kept her absorbed.

I discovered that of the stories which I knew from the Fornander Collection, few lived in the memory of the generations at present in the Islands. On the Island of Maui I met a distinguished Hawaiian lady who had been at the court of King Kalakaua, and who, in her youth, had been a trained story-teller. She tried to give me some of the stories that belonged to her repertoire. But no sooner had she begun than she declared that she was no longer familiar with the language in which the stories were told—they were in the idiom of the Alii or the Chiefs, an idiom that she had not used since her days at court.

I heard many stories told, some by men, some by women. One of the best story-tellers that I came across was a young man whom I met on the Island of Molokai. His father was Chinese, and he had learnt the stories from his grandmother. He told me several stories; one of them was the story of the rescue of Hina by her son Kana, a story given in Fornander, and evidently belonging to the folk.

What impressed me most in these recitals was the gesture of the story-teller. Every feature, every finger of the man or woman becomes alive, becomes dramatic, as the recital is entered on. The gesture of the Hawaiian makes [[xix]]the telling of a story a dramatic entertainment. Scholars have written of the long and monotonous stories told in the old days in Hawaii. The stories were long, but the gesture of the story-teller must have saved them from an unrelieved monotony. I was made to recall again and again Melville’s description of an entertainment given him by a genial Marquesan youth; it is a description that gives the spirit in which the unspoiled Polynesian dramatizes his moods and his reactions. Says Melville: “Upon my signifying my desire that he should pluck me the young fruit of some particular tree, the handsome savage, throwing himself into a sudden attitude of surprise, feigns astonishment at the apparent absurdity of the request. Maintaining this position for a moment, the strange emotions depicted on his countenance soften down into one of humorous resignation to my will, and then looking wistfully up to the tufted top of the tree, he stands on tip-toe, straining his neck and elevating his arm, as though endeavoring to reach the fruit from the ground where he stands. As if defeated in this childish attempt, he now sinks to the earth despondingly, beating his breast in well-acted despair; and then, starting to his feet all at once, and throwing back his head, raises both hands, like a school boy about to catch a falling ball. And continuing this for a moment or two, as if in expectation that the fruit was going to be tossed down to him by some good spirit on the tree-top, he turns wildly round in another fit of despair, and scampers off to a distance of thirty or forty yards. Here he remains a while, eyeing the tree, the very picture of misery; but the next moment, receiving, as it were, a flash of inspiration, he rushes again towards it, and clasping both [[xx]]arms about the trunk, with one elevated a little above the other, he presses the soles of his feet close together against the tree, extending his legs from it until they are nearly horizontal, and his body becomes doubled into an arch; then, hand over hand and foot after foot he rises from the earth with steady rapidity, and almost before you are aware of it, has gained the cradled and embowered nest of nuts, and with boisterous glee flings the fruit to the ground.” Imagine this spontaneous gesture applied to the telling of a story, every incident of which gives rise to gesture. But the gesture in the story-recital was not merely spontaneous; it was trained, as was the gesture in the hula or Polynesian ballet. Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has a chapter on gesture in his Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and he gives this instance amongst others: “To indicate death, the death of a person, the finger-tips, placed in apposition, are drawn away from each other with a sweeping gesture and at the same time lowered till the palms face the ground. In this case also we find diversity. One old man, well acquainted with hula matters, being asked to signify in pantomimic fashion ‘The king is sick,’ went through the following motions: He first pointed upward, to indicate the heaven-born one, the king; then he brought his hands to his body and threw his face into a painful grimace. To indicate the death of the king he threw his hands upward towards the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight.”

This unconstrained, dramatic gesture is being lost. There is no longer a school for gesture in the hula. And the Hawaiian is checking his movements towards gesture. It used to be said: “Tie an Hawaiian’s hands and he can’t [[xxi]]talk.” The older men and women still have that wonderful command of their features and their hands—a command that made them the greatest ballet-performers that the world, I believe, has ever had—but the younger generation feel that to use gesture is to be rustic, to be “Kanaka.”.

There is still, amongst the Hawaiians who live in the old Polynesian way, in villages along the beaches, with the taro patches near, a great treasury of poetry and native lore. But the newspaper and the victrola are taking up the time and the interest that used to be devoted to poetry, traditional games, riddles, and the like. I have been in cottages where the people still sit or lie on their mats on the floor, ignoring tables, chairs, and beds, and where they eat with their fingers, lifting the poi out of the common bowl. In such houses I have found a real scholarship, a delight in poetry, and the possession of such a quantity of it as would put to shame a cultivated American, Englishman, or Frenchman. But even in such houses I was aware that the tradition was passing. Sitting on the floor in one such house, around a petroleum lamp also on the floor, I have spelled out news items in an Hawaiian newspaper that told of the French in the Ruhr and preparations for elections in Ireland.

The world surges in on the Hawaiian Islands. And the Hawaiian can no longer give himself solely to the tradition that bound him to the valleys and the mountains, and that knit him to Wakea and Papa, who begat and brought forth the islands and the men and women upon them. That separate tradition, which for thousands of years he lived by, is being broken up, as the surge breaks up the lava on [[xxii]]his coast. The Hawaiian who, at the time when the Americans were making their declaration of independence, was still working with tools of stone, knowing nothing of metals, of pottery, of the loom, and knowing of no animal larger than a dog or a pig, has now to take some account of the continents.

With one exception the titles in this collection cover stories that are Hawaiian in the sense that they were given their shape upon the Hawaiian Islands. That exception is The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui. Although the scene of the demi-god’s adventures is Hawaiian, I have used incidents related of him in other Polynesian islands—in New Zealand, Samoa, and the lesser islands. I have treated Ma-ui, not as an Hawaiian, but as the Pan-Polynesian hero that he is. With this exception the stories are all out of the Hawaiian tradition, or rather out of the Polynesian tradition as it has been shaped in Hawaii.

And the stories are mainly taken from that treasure house of Hawaiian lore, the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, which form Volumes IV–VI of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Honolulu, published 1916–1919. I have gone outside the Fornander Collection in several instances. The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui comes out of Mr. Westervelt’s valuable book, Ma-ui the Demi-God; the stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne come out of Mr. Thrum’s Stories of the Menehunes and Mr. Rice’s Hawaiian Legends; and I have drawn the story about Hina, the Woman of Lalo-hana, from David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities, and the story about the [[xxiii]]Shark-god from an old publication of the Islands, The Maile Quarterly. But it is the Fornander Collection that has given a cast to this book, and I must now give a brief account of it.