Chanting Grief, Dancing Memories: Objectifying Hawaiian laments

Abstract

IntroductionThroughout Polynesia, death and funerals were, and in some islands still are, some of the most important social events, with unbounded grief often expressed. Immediate expressions of grief might be voiced in special ways and categorised with special terms, such as tangi in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and poetic eulogies might be composed some time after a death has occurred. Though these are often mentioned in ethnographic literature, not many studies have been published on this specialised category of music/poetry. In the Oceania volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music,l for example, most authors of Polynesian music articles devote only a few sentences to laments, and do not focus on their importance, style or poetry. On the other hand, the concept of laments has been used in contemporary expressive culture. For example, Samoan-Japanese artist Shigeyuki Kihara styles the performance of his recent work 'Taualuga: the last dance' as a lament for the loss of Samoan culture through colonisation.2 Between these two poles are passing mentions of sad songs as laments-for example, a Cook Islander sings a song about her dead mother, but not in a distinctive style,3 or a danced 'lament for a kite' as a metaphor for a missing loved one (in the Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution). This essay is a step towards filling the void in recent literature about Hawaiian laments by exploring the poetry of traditional and modern laments known as kanikau and the changing performances and contexts of Hawaiian grieving.In socially stratified HawaTi, as known in the nineteenth century, grief over an individual's death was expressed and commemorated visually, verbally and with bodily movement, its elaboration depending on one's place in society. The passing of a high-ranking chief was an appropriate occasion for self-mutilation, such as knocking out teeth or inflicting wounds. Shark teeth were mounted into wooden handles and used to cut oneself, hair was cut on one side of the head,4 and sometimes the tongue was tattooed. High chief-ess Kamamalu (c. 1800-24, the wife of Liholiho, Kamehameha II), at the death of Keopuolani (her motherin-law), tattooed her tongue and remarked: 'Pain, great indeed, but greater my affection!'5 Jacques Arago, during his 1819 visit to Hawafi, noted that the body of Ka'ahumanu (a wife of Kamehameha I, c. 1758-1819) bore the marks of a great number of burns and incisions that she inflicted on herself at the death of her husband.6 This convention evolved into the practice of tattooing a chief's name and the date of death on one's arm, as illustrated by J. Alphonse Pellion during the voyage of Freycinet. At the highest level of society, the bones of dead chiefs were encased in coconut-fibre sennit caskets made of fibre cords that had protective prayers chanted into them during fabrication by a specialised kahuna (priest). This objectified prayer stayed with the bones as a perpetual kapu (taboo).'Crystallized Voice of Grief'More relevant to us here is poetry composed and/or performed for the dead, which has become objectified and preserved in written form since the nineteenth century. Traditional Hawaiian music is based on poetry, much of which is intoned/chanted/sung with a small number of pitches and in a narrow melodic range without polyphony. Vibrato, called H H, is an important element of style and varies with the type of intoned poem. A well-developed lament genre called kanikau extols the virtues of the deceased and provides an appropriate medium for the stylised wailing engaged in at the time of death. Not many laments or dirges have been sound recorded because of Hawaiians' reluctance to sing a dirge when no actual death has occurred or is imminent. A few were recorded on wax cylinders, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, but not in context. One of these recordings comes from the story of the volcano goddess Pele and her sister Hfiaka, where it is used to tell part of the narrative. …