Sleeping with David Malo

Sleeping with David Malo

I’m listening to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, and the first line of the story sent me off on a path of rememberance. “Princeton in the summer smelled of nothing,” she says. Although the narrator of the story, Ifemelu who is on a Fellowship at Princeton preferred the absence of smell to the distinct aromas that adhered to other American cities, I felt the opposite about Boston, particularly the flowers along my neighborhood walk, which would look enthralling----yet give off little or no scent. “What good are these flowers?” I voiced out loud one day after being disappointed by bending down to hanu half a dozen times. Pua ʻaʻala ʻole---- Flowers without scent, were missing half, if not all of their beauty.

In Hawaiian mele and poetry a lover is compared to an incomparable flower whose scent recalls the most vivid assignation. Consider the refrain from the famous mele, Ke Aloha composed by Lei Collins and Maddy Lam, “Ma Kuʻu poli mai ʻoe/ E kuʻu ipo aloha/ he ʻala onaona kou /i ke ano ahiahi. Come into my embrace/ my dearest love / your fragrance is alluring /In the evening time. But really, the poet is expressing emotions that are not revealed in the flat translation. (which is of course the conceit of all Hawaiian songs!) The scent of the ipo is what gives that hour of the evening its very nature of yearing/desire/and sheltering peace.

The scent on the air, encountered by chance would send chills of recollection down one’s spine, engaging the senses, sending you on the search for your ipo. This is the nature of the pua mae ‘ole----for a flower may whither and fade, but it’s scent, ever connected with experience infused by aloha, will never fade, until memory itself fades.

            But what about other memories, and experiences? Could our moʻolelo Hawai’i also be a pua mae ʻole? A never fading flower? I am writing a biography of Davida Malo for a new publication of Ka Moʻoʻolelo Hawai’i. A work I will probably return to for the rest of my life. When I wrote an MA thesis on Malo that I completed in 1998, one of my oldest friends joked that I was sleeping with him. “How’s your boyfriend David Malo?” she would say by way of greeting. And she would tell our other friends, like an older sister teasing the younger about her first crush, “Noe is sleeping with David Malo.”

Now as a more mature writer, researcher, and with a degree in American History behind me, I go back once more to grapple with and consider this most difficult of all subjects---the biography of a man, most misunderstood. How do I write this life, while suppressing my own desire-----to make of him, a “good man?” A man worthy of our consideration? Do our historical subjects need our love or trust? Or is the goodness that we construct something we create to make ourselves feel better about the past? About our history? About ourselves?

             I’ll tell you the dirty secret about David Malo. Some readers have dismissed him as a brainwashed missionary convert, inauthentic Hawaiian, Uncle Tom--- whose work Ka Moʻoʻolelo Hawaii therefore should not be read, because you can’t trust him or anything he’s written.  I still remember with irritation the afternoon when a professor called me out in front of a class and told them that Malo was the subject of my MA thesis in a most dismissive and amused tone.

This of course is an extremist position, most readers are not sure what to make of the synthesized text, taking what they want from it and leaving behind what seems offensive or confusing. The “authentic” bits become foundational for Hawaiian identity, validating of deep cultural knowledge, while the Christian bits can be ignored as anomalous or an example of his “living in two worlds.”

Even though Malo may not need our love or trust, my task as a writer and as a professor is to encourage potential readers to adopt methods that allow them to engage the manuscript in the context in which it was constructed. To see the text and not try to make an incomplete sketch of the man based upon one manuscript he wrote in a lifetime of writing: letters, laments, essays, sermons, obituaries, and short histories.

            So, we should revisit Malo’s life, and work on developing ways of reading appropriate to the text and HIS times, not just our own. The politics of history today are banal and steal the fragrance from the subjects of our work. Researchers choose projects about nationalism or sovereignty, they are incited to be activists. Students are encouraged to undertake projects that will return the land to the people, and the people to the land. Creating original statements about what it means to be kānaka maoli based upon a narrow range of primary source engagement, often in English, as if the Hawaiian language archive of the 19^th century is an artifact of an irrelevant, long ago past. And while I don’t think any of these projects are bad in themselves, I think the politics motivating this uni-direction, of this gazing at the 21^st century piko, are corrosive and self-serving. We are all authentic Hawaiians. We don’t have to prove it. In the end the mountains of self-authenticating scholarship we produce will become its own artifact of the present.

            But even, I, have a problem. As inheritors of a colonial historiography like ours, and well, even as we have been as a lāhui constructed by this history, often times falsely, this huge historiographic edifice makes me mad, and makes me want to fight back. I am trying however to measure the length of my punches, how far is my reach? (rhetorically, linguistically, theoretically?) Do I jab or hook here? Does this particularly entrenched falsehood in the historiography warrant an uppercut or right cross, should I just go in for the kill?

            And, I can’t help but notice that the stakes for my engagement differ from my colleagues down the hall who are also passionately writing histories that “include” Hawai’i. My task seems more daunting however, for it is nothing short of questioning the foundations of our received knowledges about Hawaiʻi.  It is asking of people to abandon some of the contexts that they are so comfortable with and framing new ones in which to locate Hawai’i. It is to take Hawaiʻi not as the fragment that proves or makes exotic their argument, but to consider its wholeness, and depth, first. Does that make me an American Historian or a Hawaiian Historian? How can you invite scholars to write a transnational history while insisting that they “know” and “show” Hawaiʻi as deeply as they “know” the U.S.?

            I long for my twenties when my politics were all surface. Everything was all Haole vs Hawaiians, and I was angry then too. Captain Cook and the missionaries were the straw men (and women) to blame. But now I know too much, mostly because I have had another lifetime of education, and I’ve read a lot more of the Hawaiian language writings that the people I am writing about left behind----Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians.

And because of this I have to be ever vigilant, that my way of producing Malo as a subject of history is not producing the person I want him to be. He doesn’t have to be a hero at the end of the day.  And I am very wary about the limitations of any kind of remunerative justice that can be delivered through the rewriting of history, though my sense of justice in history is offended----why can’t Hawaiians have role models to be proud of? Why can’t all of our kūpuna just be good? In the end I think, he just has to be. Malo is, I believe, one of our pua mae ʻole, he inoa ʻaʻala mau, although in his lifetime I believe it may have been more appropriate to call him after the epithet associated with Lahainaluna the seminary he attended and taught at: Ke kukui piʻo ʻole o Kauaʻula. An enduring flame of knowledge, of knowing that shall never be extinguished.