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( kama'aina = local Hawai'i person, lit. "child of the land": now you know. :-) ) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101771.html Our Japanese American cousins always said behind our backs that we Hawaii cousins were 10 years behind the times. So when our home became a state in August 1959, it would logically follow that it took a while for our birth certificates to catch up. For a few years, this new state still issued Certificates of Hawaiian Birth. I was born on the island of Molokai -- blink and you missed Kaunakakai, its port town, 1,000 residents on the whole island at the time, a pineapple, red-dirt-permanently-embedded-in-your-heels kind of place. It was a very provincial island in 1961, the birth year that President Obama and I share.
So as our state celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend, the fuss over Obama's birth certificate -- its authenticity and what it might be hiding -- has been kind of perplexing to me. The president's mother is American. His father is Kenyan. Is he an anomaly because he is of American and Hawaiian and Kenyan heritage? Exotic? Because he's from a state that isn't a state because we aren't on the mainland? Because he is from this provincial place that had been a state for only two years when he was born? For a few voices shouting loudly from the fringe, that has been enough reason to raise questions about whether he really is what he says he is....
Meanwhile, here in paradise -- land of white sandy beaches, ukuleles, grass shacks, mai tais with paper umbrellas and orchids, pineapples, surfing, domestic abuse, homelessness, juvenile delinquency, welfare dependency -- stockbrokers, teachers, firemen, fishermen, dog groomers and most other locals didn't even talk about our president's birth certificate over their Starbucks Frappuccinos as the morning news explained the controversy. No one seemed to care pau hana (after work) over a Heineken Light at Verbano, with "Wheel of Fortune" on the bar's TV. So he's a keiki o ka aina (child of the land), our president a local boy (and black at that) done real good -- bring home the kalua pig, baby. It was no big conspiracy. It was no big deal. It was, as Don Ho would say, "Ain't no big thing, bruddah." And why? Some continental folk, you mainlanders, just don't get us. It's true.
We are a state of painful paradoxes -- a haven for immigrants from China, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Puerto Rico, Korea, Germany and the Philippines who came in the late 1800s to work on haole (white) sugar plantations. Later came Samoans, Laotions, Tongans, Vietnamese, Fijians, Cambodians, Thais and Micronesians. We are a gigantic collision of cultural practices -- fireworks at the new year, $3 to $50 leis, dragon dances, dim sum takeout, coconut hair oil, gandule rice, sarongs, native cowboys, summer rolls and precious pesos sent home to family. We are a state of fragile tolerance.Disclaimer: The author, perhaps Hawai'i best-known contemporary novelist and poet, is a dear personal friend. :loveya: |
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