Rather than try to slow-carve an entire mountain of thoughts and stories surrounding the Maui fires down, Iʻve decided, instead, to constrict myself from the start, to pick the smallest possible waʻa, the tiniest vessel - a single word, a lone syllable - to sail to you — ʻū.
ʻŪ. First, it is the word for a held breath. “ʻAʻole i ʻū,” is a phrase used when something has moved so fast that one doesnʻt even have time to take a breath. Fast like the fires that swept through Lāhainā town, that blazed up the gulches Upcountry, but also fast like the boats that flew across the Pailolo channel with supplies in the days after, fast like the hands that halihali, that packed and carried water and food and clothes, like the community hubs that materialized overnight, like the kitchens that cooked up 10,000 meals a day for weeks on end. Fast like all the chants and all the prayers, their endings animated with a, “lele wale!” so that they would fly, forthwith, to Maui. Weeks went by before our communities could even take a breath. For many, they are holding their breath still.
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ʻŪ is also short for ʻulu, for breadfruit. Once our communities caught their breath, the stories started to pour out, all around, of the ancient groves of ʻulu that once stretched across the Lāhainā plains, groves so storied and precious that they are still referred to in epithet. “Lāhainā, I ka malu ʻulu o Lele,” Lāhainā, in the shade of the breadfruit trees of Lele.
ʻUlu did not just provide shade. ʻUlu was an important food source and part of a rich agricultural field complex which also included a staggering amount of loʻi kalo, taro patches, numbering over 1,700 in the Kauaʻula-Lāhainā region, alongside loko iʻa kalo, fish and taro ponds. Before it was a tourist destination, before it was a sugar plantation town, before it was a whalers' respite, Lāhainā was ʻāina aliʻi, it was the sacred seat of our Kingdom and it was momona, it was rich in fresh water and food.
The people of Lāhainā have shared their vision for their community, prioritizing in their recovery process a return to this long remembered health, a return of wai, of stream water, to their places, a return of planted foods, of ʻulu, of abundance.
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Lastly, ʻū is most commonly called out in sorrow. ʻŪ means to groan, to sigh, to mourn; ʻū, the word we use for grief. Peoples the world over all have their own rituals, their own practices to move them through grief. For millennia in Hawaiʻi, we poured it out, we cried — “ʻū!” We practiced uē helu, literally translated as enumerated weeping, a wailed recounting of the life of a loved one. In the 1830ʻs, when our oral language began being written down in newspaper print, kanikau, mourning chants, filled the papers.
Kanikau were full of language to describe the act of weeping. Kanikau were also deeply personal, detailing beautiful and intimate shared experiences between siblings, between children and parents, between lovers, friends. For me, kanikau distill the power of public and tender language to help in collective healing.
Kanikau were also rich repositories for place-knowledge. When one recounted the beautiful long hair of a beloved, the wind that once blew through those locks was also named. Every memory of the lost one was grounded in place, and in this way - not lost at all. If they loved to swim, then which bay? Which stream? If they loved to adventure, then over what ridge? Across what plain? What were the names of the rains that fell around them, that fed them throughout their lives? The work of the kanikau was to bind the fleeting lives of people to the imperishable life of the land, to plant our memories all around, to be held by them whenever a certain wind comes blowing in.
For Lāhainā and for her people pā i ka ʻū lā, who have been touched by this grief — an excerpt from a kanikau, dated 5 January 1854 in Ka ʻElele Hawaiʻi, written by G. M. Koha at the passing of his older brother, M.S. Kauwahi:
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"So beloved is Lāhainā, where we first lived and where I would follow you about. Cherished are the many ponds of ʻAuwaiawao, revered is the ascent to Kulilole and the hill of Paʻupaʻu, and so much love flows there at Kanahā stream where we would go. A crying out, a love for you, my brother."
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He ʻū, he aloha iā ʻoe e kō Lāhainā.
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