Student of the Month November/December 2013 Featuring: Lee Kava & T-man Thompson
University of Hawai‘i at MÄ noa
Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa If you are a student and would like to feature your work in Student of the Month or an instructor for a creative writing course and would like to submit exemplary University of Hawai‘i student work to Hawai‘i Review’s Student of the Month, please send submissions to our Submittable account at bit.ly/submit2HR Contact us at hawaiireview@gmail.com
A Note on the Series:
Our Student of the Month series features on our website stellar student writing and visual art from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the institution where our roots dig deep. In print for more than 40 years, our journal has been an established voice in the Pacific and beyond for decades, featuring work from emerging writers alongside literary heavyweights. The Student of the Month series is our latest effort to expand Hawai‘i Review’s reach in local and far-reaching literary communities. For the second installment of the Student of the Month series, we are thrilled to feature the following poets from UHM Professor Craig Santos Perez’s fall 2013 Pacific Poetry and Poetics course: Lee Kava & T-man Thompson. The majority of Hawai‘i Review’s current staff (four out of the five of us!) are in this amazing class with Lee and T-man, and we were so moved by Lee’s “Hafekasi” and T-man’s “Warrior Waka” poems that we had to publish them. Prof. Craig Santos Perez describes what led up to the creation of these poems as follows: A few weeks ago, we read Maori poet Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka in our Contemporary Pacific Poetry and Poetics course. His book explores the themes of family, culture, identity, memory, genealogy, migration, and diaspora through the multifaceted symbol of the waka, or canoe. When our class discussed the book, it triggered a deep emotional response in all of us. How do we navigate the trauma of the many departures and storms in our lives? How do we find belonging in our many arrivals and returns? What is our destination? Who is our crew? The students wrote poems in response to reading Star Waka and asking these questions. It’s incredible, the gorgeous new writing that can be produced in response to reading inspiring writers like Sullivan. The chords that their materials strike in us reverberate out into the community. We’re so happy to be able to amplify these reverberations by publishing Lee and T-man’s poems here! We hope you enjoy their dope poems as much as we do! —The Editors
Hafekasi Lee Kava
1. Half-caste A person of mixed-race descending from parents of different atmospheric layers like, one parent troposphere the other stratosphere Smearing each other’s sweat Exhaling floating daughters 2. Mixed-race Relating to people of different directions, relations shipping over seas and skies crossing racial borderlines So when Tongans ask “Why so light?” You look skyward saying “Ask the airlines.” 3. Hyphenated Of, relating to, or designating a person, group or organization of mixed origins I— dentify as you like but what they really want to know is not that you like punkrock, or actionadventure, but how far you can straddle— over pick up lines like “mixed girls keep it tight”— they are never prepared for the tongue lashings of strongdashed women.
4. ? Otherwise known as interrogation marked eyes upon body hair skin soul Family, strangers both confused you don’t know how to Tongan American Pacific Islander Woman enough— Interrogative ogling wondering “Where’d she come from? guess that hafekasi don’t know how to navigate earth’s curves or dot the right identity points.” 5. . Also called the full stop punctuation mark ending long-sentenced notions that single-mothered mixes are mistakes. In fact, we are the 9-monthed periods of declarative mothers, not halfraised, but fully loved decisions. We are strong casts of wind and water, we are the mixed breaths of air and sea. Lee Kava is a hafekasi, Tongan-palangi trying to be a poet. She is a Masters candidate at the UH Mānoa Center for Pacific Islands Studies and her work focuses on Tongan identities and music. She is very, very grateful for the love and support she receives from her family and friends here and abroad, and hopes to make them proud through the work she does.
Warrior Waka T-man Thompson
I have lived all of my life in Hawai‘i, yet my journey began much earlier than the date of my birth. But how, you might wonder, can one’s journey commence without the traveler even having been born? Understand this, if nothing else—that in the pacific we are led by our past, and hence, as our paddles pierce the Pacific Ocean blue in angry thrusts so powerful, they etch histories into the sea floor, for our paddles move back first, before they move forward. So it is, in 1937 my paternal great-grandparents Arthur Fa’afaga Thompson and Felila Meatoga left Samoa and came to Hawai‘i on errand to build a better life, most of their children, including my grandfather, and subsequently my father, choosing to make a home for themselves on the shores of Lā‘ie. In1963 my maternal grandparents John Arthur Elkington and Waitohi Wineera, left Aotearoa and came to Hawai‘i on errand to build the Polynesian Cultural Center, most of their children, including my mother, choosing to make a home for themselves on the shores of Lā‘ie. 20 years later, April 1983, my parents, at 17, are married and two months after, I am born, Norman Fua’alii Thompson III. Young and still growing up himself, my father was angry and abusive and 16 years, five children into our journey, our waka began to sink. Divorced hulls forced my mother into new waters and unreliable winds, but she continued to paddle, we continued to paddle. Eventually, learning the rough seas and tracing the winds we became strong again. We paddled harder and faster towards a new life, taking a new course. We paddled fiercely, the whiplash of each stroke strong enough to scar the skies in correspondence to the histories etched below, guarded by the eyes of Mahina this time, instead of Mano. We paddled, the trailing currents of our ancestors, our histories, held on to us wherever we went like the tentacles of jellyfish whose shining bodies though far behind, still stuck to us and stung like sin, tattooing our skin as a reminder of where we’d been. It is 2007, the turbulent seas could not conquer my mother, who now navigates the ocean in bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work and psychology, and not just wind alone. Seeing another family, sinking as we once had, we lashed our waka to theirs so we could be whole again.
It is 2013 and I man my own waka now. Having learned from the winds and oceans paddled by my mother I have navigated different waters from both of my parents, though using the same wood from which their paddles were made, journeying through similar currents, listening, to the same winds. Because . . . You must understand this, if nothing else—that in the pacific we are led by our past, and hence, as our paddles pierce the Pacific Ocean blue in angry thrusts so powerful, we etch histories into the sea floor, for our paddles move back, before moving forward.
T-man Thompson is a second-year M.A. studying Pacific Literature. He was born and raised in Lā‘ie, Hawai‘i and received his B.A. from Brigham Young University-Hawai‘i. He is of Hawaiian, Maori, and Samoan descent and writes about South Pacific cultures.
www.hawaiireview.org Hawai‘i Review Staff, 2013-2014 Anjoli Roy, Editor in Chief Kelsey Amos, Managing Editor Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Design Editor No‘ukahau‘oli Revilla, Poetry Editor David Scrivner, Fiction Editor
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