A Hawai'i Anthology: A Collection of Works by Recipients of the Hawai'i Award for Literature, 1974-1996.

Flanagan, Kathleen

Joseph Stanton, ed. Honolulu. State Foundation on Culture and the Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, distr.). 1997. xiv + 278 pages, ill. $45 ($24.95 paper). ISBN 0-8248-1976-4 (1977-2 paper).

A Hawai'i Anthology gathers works by authors who have been awarded a prize that laudably encourages literary achievement not only by writers of fiction but also by linguists, historians, and anthropologists. These writers as a group depict a place that has been different things to many peoples: island monarchy, a region known as the Sandwich Islands, as well as one of the United States.

Some of the awards have been given posthumously, lending a vital historical essence to the volume, although it might be helpful to supply the dates of the writers' lives, as well as dates of composition and prize reception. As it is, the collection celebrates the diversity of Hawai'i which, like the Pacific Island region in general, is the result of many migrations, old and new. It also, however, notes the force and unwillingness that accompanied change, particularly that effected by migrants from Europe and the United States.

The works are arranged in five sections that compel a reader to recognize the many complicated elements which have shaped Hawaiian culture. "Growing Up in Hawai'i" acknowledges the Polynesian, European, and Asian legacies of its present inhabitants. The opening short story by John Dominis Holt, "The Pool," like many of the selections in the volume, depicts the life of a protagonist who must walk astride the worlds of the Pacific and Europe by virtue of his varied ancestry. Entries in the section "Legend and Song" inform the reader of the place of myth and tradition in Hawaiian and other cultures, as in the excerpt from Rubellite Kawena Johnson's work on the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant. W. S. Merwin's poem "The Last One," with lines such as "Everything was theirs because they thought so," suggests a connection between environmental and cultural losses that surfaces throughout the volume.

The section "Historical Considerations" contains A. Grove Day's account of nineteenth-century Hawaiian women of high birth who renounced not only their gods but also restrictions on women as they embraced the new deity of Christian missionaries. This work is followed by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's play on the same subject, a drama which shows to great advantage the power of fiction to make history seem real. "Growing Up Elsewhere" contains varyingly autobiographical pieces by Reuel Denny, Leon Edel, and Maxine Hong Kingston and is the section most challenging to the unity of the volume. While each writer in this section has resided in Hawai'i at one time in his or her life, these pieces are not set in Hawai'i. "Being Where We Are" ends the volume with contemporary short stories and poems that comment on what has changed in Hawai'i (as in John Unterecker's poem "State Symbol") and on what has stayed the same (as in Cathy Song's "-square Mile").

The selections in the volume effectively raise the questions of origin, belonging, and place that so absorb many cultures in contemporary times. They help represent the mosaic that is Hawai'i, a location of evolving populations.

Kathleen Flanagan Longwood College