The Language of Hybridity Part 2: Voyagers
This is the second part of a 2-part post
. I’ve made an effort to make this piece its own thing but do think it may be a better experience if you read part-1 first. Regardless, thank you for your eyeballs whether you read this first or follow this link to the first article to read them chronologically or if you just dive in below.
So flash forward 3 degrees and 2 decades in New York and a chance morning news report of a particular boat coming in to port on the West side of Manhattan.
Living in Brooklyn for the last 20 years has been a mixed bag. Great things, challenging things, old friends and new ones have come and gone. New York is a tough city requiring grit, nearly constant motion and that leaves a mark it’s sure. New York is a port city which means water and the East River and Hudson Rivers are never far when you are on the island of Manhatten. But other than meeting a guy that surfs the Rockaways, the dirty water and the ceaseless shark like movement of the city, New York has never struck me as an Oceanic city.
New York is a tough city requiring grit, nearly constant motion
and that leaves a mark it’s sure…
On the 5th of June 2016, a double hulled canoe named Hokulea journeyed all the way from the Hawaiian Islands to the island of Manhattan.
Hokulea on the East River with United Nations in background - Photographer unknown (leave photographer in comments for credit)
Now, it’s a small wonder when I take a stair underground and a metal train-car shoots me under water, roads and buildings to then pop up in a different borough. But that train ride brought me here and just there before me was the Hokulea. A vessel that had circumnavigated THE WHOLE EARTH to arrive here. Not by magic but by ancient Polynesian know-how. Can you imagine the effort it took, the training, the rotating of crews, the sheer courage and confidence in one’s abilities and knowledge to bring that canoe across the world?
The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage 2013-2019 - from Hokulea.com
But, seeing the Hokulea there, I was struck by how indigenous knowledge - the Hawaiian Language and even Hula - had almost been lost in the occupation and colonizing of the Hawaiian Islands. Having done further research, I found out that in the 1970s artist Herb Kawainui Kane and the Voyaging Society had to find outside help to re-learn oceanic navigation in a traditional Polynesian manner. I was stunned that Hawaiian seafaring navigation had to be replaced or supplemented with Micronesian (similar?) know-how! That is how close to catastrophic cultural erasure Hawaiian ways had come. Now I only settled in the Islands in the 80’s so I can’t bear witness to the forces internal and external that experts and cultural-critics think contributed to that erasure. All I can do is think of how enriched my life was though learning hula and how everyone who calls those islands home or has ventured over to visit benefits from the cultural gifts that Hawaii has and gives to the observant.
““On that first voyage, we were facing cultural extinction. There was no navigator from our culture left. The Voyaging Society looked beyond Polynesia to find a traditional navigator to guide Hōkūle‘a: Mau Piailug, a navigator from a small island called Satawal, in Micronesia. He agreed to come to Hawai‘i and guide Hōkūle‘a to Tahiti. Without him, our voyaging would never have taken place. Mau was the only traditional navigator who was willing and able to reach beyond his culture to ours.””
The cultural gift Mau gave has no measure or comparison that I can think of and was integral in bringing forth this part of the resurgence of Hawaiian culture. But, to my understanding, that gift was in the truest spirit of what I know of that island cultural imperative of sharing,
If the Hokulea and her crew could be here and a product of a difficult to achieve hybridized “cultural” effort, why couldn’t I be here? I mean the Hokulea is a traditional double hull canoe shape now made of plywood and fiberglass and has solar panels but is navigated with borrowed Micronesian traditional means. That is as in-between and as hybridized as it gets, right?
VIA Big Island Video News Youtube
The intent of Hokulea’s voyage was to promote a message of care and respect for the ocean and indigenous cultures. Expressed in Hawaiian mālama honua, meaning “caring for island earth.” XXX
An unintended and unexpected result of me SEEING her there was such a feeling of pride and comfort it took my breath away. It was like magic in so far as my two lives, my two places had been connected and a circuit had formed. My perspective about it as two places or two separate things, at least. had shifted.
This past February the Hawaii Contemporary
held a Virtual Art Summit that presented the themes and framing of the upcoming Hawai’i Triennial 2022
This past February I had the pleasure of virtually attending the Hawaii Contemporary held a Art Summit 2021 that presented the themes and framing of the upcoming Hawai’i Triennial 2022. In his comments, Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick - associate curator to HT22 and accomplished artist – introduced some very specific language and concepts that helped me understand that experience I had in 2016. Concepts that described the perceptual shift that I had not been able to name (and hence am only beginning to understand) and for that I am grateful.
These are the two ideas Broderick presented at the Art Summit that resonated with me the loudest (paraphrasing to the best of my ability as follows);
We can think of Culture as a network or constellation.
We can think of the ocean as a network - like a fiber optic network - that “situates us in relation” and that permeates everything.
The moment I saw the Hokulea, the crew, Hawaii’s East-coast-living-transplants and the curious public there, I felt a shift in perspective for me. For the first time, I was of/from Hawaii and of/from Brooklyn at the same time. If those energies are different, they were commingled into a more complicated more accurate identity. The ocean as network and relational connector that Broderick had described presenting itself symbolically and PHYSICALLY on that pier.
One of the primary tributaries that exposed me to dance came through the program Showtime at the Apollo. Anyone familiar with the show’s long running “amateur night” knows there is a stump that sits just off stage. Every performer gives the “Tree of Hope” a rub before coming out to face the crowd. It is, in part, to pay respect to the ones who paved the way, to connect to the traditions of that space and for luck. In my youth that resonated with me before my introduction to Kahiko.
And as I consider my feelings of connection and estrangement from Hawai’i and her cultural gifts - then and now - I think about how I connected the love and respect of that stump and mine for this vessel that I saw off the West side of Manhattan that day in June. Insanely, I really wanted to touch the boat. To lay my hands on it in recognition of its implausible journey. Not implausible as much by its sheer mind-boggling distance it had traveled from the Hawaiian archipelago but FROM cultural erasure and subjugation.
My overlapping of Harlem and Hawai’i iconography seems unremarkable in hindsight as compared to how close these mariners brought the two objects physically! In my statement I am just relating how I was only then, because of their great feats, finally seeing how fluid and relational these places are. The power of that moment flowed from these two disparately created cultural objects. In that space they were showing me how I was simultaneously rooted in both places and gave me a profound sense of purpose and – I would go so far as to say - peace.
The Apollo got me to the mound to dance Hula and that had, in turn, gotten me to New York where I saw arguably one of the most important expressions of the resurgence of Hawaiian culture – a pure full circle moment.
The idea of “reaching beyond one’s own culture” to teach or be taught is both at the center of my own art practice and is a direct result of my great fortune of growing up in Hawai’i. I am hopeful that sharing, connecting and respecting others cultural heritage will one day be the norm.
“Diversity implies inclusion.
Permission requires asking.
Proximity leads to understanding.”
If our identity is rooted in culture of family, culture of ethnicity, culture of place, culture of religion is written on us from the moment we are born, can it be amended, reconfigured and transformed? I am hopeful that sharing, connecting and respecting others cultural heritage will one day be the norm.
Hawaii is a challenging beauty, with nuanced cultural hybridity that needs more care and attention as a model.
And perhaps this was a call to action? Maybe not to go home to Hawaii - right away, anyway - but to bring Hawaii forward in how I put forth my (cultural) efforts. Make it about care. Not just making assertions about cultural hybridity but writing love letters with the work and spreading Aloha deliberately in and out of the studio as antidote to the age of influencer and social media culture.