March 24, 2007
Kamau
kamau. 1.vt. To keep on, continue, persevere, last, add a little more. Hawaiian Dictionary, Revised and Enlarged Edition. Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert.
I’ve been going to Kumu Kahua Theatre for four or five years now. I try not to miss any of their productions. Past experience has taught me that I should stuff my purse with tissue before going. The current production, Kamau, is a real tearjerker. It focuses on Alika, a Hawaiian man who works on tour buses. The show opens with him giving his spiel as if the theatre audience were beginning a tour. “Aaaaalooooooooooooohaaaaaaaaaaa” he shouts, oozing commercial enthusiasm from his voice and his face-stretching smile. That’s guaranteed to grate on anyone who lives here. We hear it every time we take visitors to any tourist-oriented show or event. The audience is expected to respond in kind, and, as happened Sunday, is bombarded with the tacky greeting again and again until the instigator feels that it has been returned with enough gusto. For those who don’t understand, aloha as a greeting is full of warmth and genuine welcome. Like the much-repeated advisement that Eskimos have a zillion words for snow, Hawaiians have many meanings for the word aloha, but this is the one that is most abused. Thus the audience is set up to recognize that this proud and handsome Hawaiian man is sacrificing a bit of his spirit each time he greets a busload of tourists.
Alika lives in a shabby house that has been home to several generations of his family. His job with the tour company helps support his extended family, his ohana, consisting of his cousin Michael, his cousin George’s daughter, Stevie, and Stevie’s mother Lisa. His cousin George, feeling overwhelmed by his impending fatherhood, had committed suicide before his daughter Stevie was born, prior to the time when the play is taking place. In the Hawaiian tradition, Alika feels great responsibility for his ohana. He drinks, too much and too often. During his drunken reveries, he speaks with his departed mother, who offers him great wisdom which he is not always willing to hear.
As the story beings, Alika is advised by his supervisor that the tour company has been sold, but that his job is secure. He’ll have a higher-paying job in the new hotel that his new bosses are building, and he’ll be given a rent subsidy for an apartment. This is necessary because the hotel is to be built where Alika’s home now stands. The unspoiled beachfront that his family has always called home is being taken away because they have never owned title to the land itself. This is a common dilemma in Hawaii, where many homes are built on land that the homeowners can never hope to buy. The news devastates Alika and is equally unsettling to Michael, who fishes with traditional, handmade Hawaiian nets in the waters near their front door. Michael’s reaction is violent and self-destructive, while Alika feels the entire burden falling on his own shoulders.
There are no easy answers to the problems highlighted in Kamau. The play makes no attempt to put a bandaid on the sore spot or brush it away as the inevitable price of progress. What is does do, and do very well, is to illustrate the magnitude of the problem, not just the loss of place, but the destruction of traditional lifestyle and the forced abandoment of culture. I’m not sure I ever fully understood the term “white man’s burden” when I lived in the South. I’m better acquainted with it now, as I am confronted daily with the price that the Kanaka, the Hawaiian people, have paid and continue to pay, for the arrogant actions of the missionaries and businessmen who gave them destruction and prosperitity in one untidy package. Funny, isn’t it, how the prosperity part of that gift has yet to trickle down to the rightful possessors of this land of aloha.
I want to see this play again. It only ran for ninety minutes, with no intermission, but the story was so intense that I feel that I missed some of it. I’m sure that I missed a few lines when my crying suddenly accelerated into sobs. I’ll need to remember to bring tissue next time. Enough for myself and those near me, because there just weren’t enough in the entire audience last time.
Kumu Kahua Theatre receives grants and contributions from numerous sources, but, like most community theatres, could always use more support. They put on plays and workshops, subsidize playwrights and support the theatre community.There is so much more that they could do, had they the money available. I’ve never known of them asking for contributions outside of Hawaii, though I suppose it’s possible they do. I don’t know if they’ve ever sold their tee shirts online, but I bet they could. They come in a multitude of colors and the usual sizes. You’ll find contact information on the Kumu Kahua site. Why don’t you ask them? Or you could just put a check in the mail. I’m pretty sure they’d appreciate that.
Technorati Tags: ”Kumu Kahua Theatre”, Hawaii, “life in Hawaii”, theater, charity
Posted by skeet @ 3:26 pm • Society & culture
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March 24th, 2007 at 5:41 pm, kat Says:
It sounds like a truly wonderful play. I’d be crying too.
March 24th, 2007 at 8:03 pm, skeet Says:
I couldn’t even begin to decribe why it was so emotional. I think you have to live here … and have lived here for a while … to get the full impact. So much of the land here is in the hands of huge landowners, many of them descendents of the original Western presence. They can sell or close down leases anytime they want, of course, because it’s their land. My friend Alice, who lives on the beach near my home, lost her house when the lease was sold and the new owner wanted to plow down the house and build something else. It’s pathetic and it’s destroying this state, and most especially native Hawaiians.
March 25th, 2007 at 2:19 am, Imran Says:
It is indeed wonderful to spend an evening watching a play and actually leave the theater deeply affected by it. So satisfying… the message of the story has been told effectively.
Hope they are doing well financially to keep doing what they are doing now.
Have a great weekend, my friend.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:08 am, Whim Says:
Wow Skeet that sounds awesome! I hope you get to go back.