My sixth post, “Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Night is a Sharkskin Drum’ (University of Hawaii Press, 2002)” is up at the Poetry Foundation blog. Here’s an excerpt:
So from the get go, we know that she is an activist, a scholar, and a poet. Trask begins Night is a Sharkskin Drum with the section, “Born in Fire,” containing chants honoring the goddess Pele, in these two, three beat lines that sprawl across the pages. This form, her lines, really affect the canoe rowing in the open ocean regularity of the drum, and the breath of incantation:
Kino lau on the wind,
in the yellowing ti,
sounds of Akua
awaking in the dawn:
Nā-maka-o-ka-ha'i,
eyes flecked with fire,
summoning her family
from across the seas.
Sharks in the shallows,
upheaval in the heavens.
This vessel upon open ocean movement reminds me of another Pacific Islander authored poetry collection, Craig Santos Perez’s From Unincorporated Territory.
There is a great discussion going on in the comments section, which I hope you will check out. In particular, here is Maile Arvin’s comment, regarding “ethnopoetics” and “decentering whiteness”:
Re: decentering whiteness: I don’t have any familiarity with Jay Wright or with who is using/claiming this word ‘ethnopoetics’ but I do know Haunani-Kay Trask’s work and how centered it is in Kanaka Maoli-ness, so to speak.
Yet I do not think Trask is invested in contemporary identity politics in conventional ways at all. Writing from a place of indigeneity (being native in a starkly settler colonial society) is meant to be quite threatening to the various identities that supposedly fuse together Hawai’i as a multicultural melting pot. She is not trying to gently explain to an audience her difference, her multi-cultural contribution or a reach towards full citizenship. She is writing deeply of and for Native Hawaiians, and she achieves this with a strength that as you point out resonates beautifully.
So I think her work could be a good example of decentering whiteness but that it is more than that too. Trask decenters America. And perhaps this is what the best poets reach towards- not critiquing an abstract identity of whiteness but its particularities and compound realities as they impact the poet and her world.
