Hawai’i is made of islands entire of themselves
Review of Brandy Nālani McDougall’s Āina Hānau / Birth Land
By Felix Benson
Brandy Nālani McDougall’s latest poetry collection, Āina Hānau / Birth Land, is an education. Growing up in Britain, my knowledge of Hawai’i did not extend beyond popular media. From the films I watched and the music I listened to, Hawaii existed as an untouched paradisal archipelago. My youthful mind pictured mystic islands rich with violet hills; there were volcanic cliffs that made drastic descents into a pearlish sea; there were plucking instruments, and shuffling feet; and there was merriment - everywhere. Āina Hānau / Birth Land tears down my naive facade, exposing the ongoing fallout from a century-long American occupation. Like the waves which ceaselessly beat at Hawai’i’s cliff edges, a gradual erosion of indigenous culture has occurred. McDougall’s collection is not overwhelmingly despairing; as the title suggests, this is a collection of two sides. McDougall oscillates between poems which cherish and triumph a resistant Hawaiian culture such as “‘Āina Mauna” and “Ka Hana Mau Loa,” to exposés such as “College Prep Test For Those Who Will Leave Hawai’i” where statistical language dismantles a Western perspective of a Hawaiian utopia. Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a tale of two ambitions: a protest against occupation, and a celebration of a rich history.
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Language in Āina Hānau / Birth Land is idiosyncratic: any non-native speaker is bound to stumble through these poems which weave English with Ōlelo Hawaiʻi. Often, I would find myself stopping at an unfamiliar word and speculating on how to pronounce and decipher it. This felt intimidating, perhaps purposefully intimidating. There is a sense of shame I feel when obligated to translate a word foreign to me, especially when my means of doing so is via Google. Beautifully complex language is mutilated into drab, mechanical translations.
In fear of linguistic flatness, I decided to read blind. I can remember as an adolescent reading Tolstoy and getting very grumpy with the Russian translators who had been too lazy to translate the French bits! It was only a little later that I realised this was intentional; if you have not received the education of gentry then you are not supposed to participate in their conversation. The reader’s lack of knowledge is purposely alienating. A powerful inversion of this happens in Āina Hānau / Birth Land where McDougall denies the Western reader comprehension of part of her indigenous experience because they themselves have not lived it. It is an effective response to those who move to Hawai’i and reject or merely ignore its rich culture, something McDougall reflects on in “Real (G)estate,” a polemic on the Hawaiian housing market crisis.
Throughout the collection, McDougall demonstrates an aversion to conglomerates like Google or McDonald’s. Poems like “Kūka’ō’ō Heiau on Google Maps (Satellite View)” and “Honokāhua on Google Maps (Satellite Then Street Then Satellite View)” satirise the holiday goers who traverse Hawai’i via their sat-navs, unable to look up and appreciate the natural beauty. The latter poem ends with the couplet “all the moonlit hō’ailona / showing you the way forward and back” (75); if only these tourists lifted their heads up and found navigation gifted to them by nature.
The issues arising from using platforms like Google to relate to McDougall's culture by translating it into something familiar relate to the wider representation of Hawai’i by Western media. An inevitable process of commodification and appropriation occurs, where Indigenous experience is filtered into popular films and books akin to what I consumed as a young child in Britain. McDougall’s relationship to her home felt partly ineffable in the English language; it is a connection that the foreign reader must accept they cannot be completely drawn into. That is, until we encounter the collection’s eponymous final poem, “Āina Hānau Birth Land,” an episodic meditation on motherhood. Nestled in the middle (7), and toward the end (14) are catalogues of definitions for Hawaiian words McDougall has used throughout. The complexity of her definitions is palpable: The word “kuakoko,” which Google translates to “back,” is for McDougall:
childbirth, bearing-down
Labour; the results of uncontrolled
emotions; kua: the back of a person
or animal in distinction from the
face; the top of a ridge; or highland;
var. of akua, god, image; the midrib;
koko: blood; rainbow hued; the
netting around a calabash; falling
rain where the light shines through
and it appears reddish (117)
Near the end of the collection, the reader encounters an explosion of meaning. It is an epiphanic moment where McDougall invites us into what we have been deprived of: linguistic comprehension. In light of these definitions, the collection becomes cyclical, asking us to return to the beginning and translate some (notably not all) of the once puzzling words with McDougall’s rich definitions — the reader is left all the wiser. With the words I was still unfamiliar with, I was left in a state of wonder and awe at the potential breadth of their meaning.
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McDougall’s collection is a masterclass in typology. In “Prepositions” McDougall writes, “between / these words / islands / live” (69). Battling against the pervasive eye of global satellites, McDougall reinvents a Hawai’i through her own poetic form. In “āina Mauna,” lines build, rising and falling into mountain-shaped stanzas; in “Nā Pu’u One O Wathe'è” language forms like volcanic sediment into craggy islands, each line breaking into a new ridge. Through her language, McDougall embarks on a cartographic process, mapping her birthland with rich detail. Against the global surveillance of Google maps, is a unique and personal reinvention of what Hawai’i is.
In a recent interview with Hawai’i Public Radio, McDougall commented on a western literary tradition: “Even if the western canon is intended to be more inclusive these days, you really lose out on the chance of teaching the literature of your community and of your students. … Students can be exposed to literature that is most relevant to them, then they can see themselves as literary people. Then we can grow an amazing canon of our own in Hawai’i” (Han). The canonical poet John Donne famously wrote “no man is an island entirely of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a repudiation of this. For McDougall, “holding title to a continent, / to islands, to oceans” has resulted in the ongoing marginalisation and erosion of Hawaiian culture (51). Her collection is a championing of the island, and the people who native to them, “we are these islands” says McDougall (136). Her collection is a celebration of a unique experience which cannot exist on a continental level. Hawaii’s shackling to mainland America has been destructive: there is the incessant environmental violence “by Americans / who bomb and burn and shoot Hawai’i” (81); there is a housing market crisis: constant “home equity appreciation on stolen / Indigenous land” (23); and there is the impossible bureaucracy enforced upon native Hawaiians. In her isolated collection, McDougall separates her Hawai’i from this, navigating the reader through landscapes of meaning that are ever distant from the main.
At its core, Āina Hānau / Birth Land is an optimistic collection. Where cultural erosion has occurred, there is room for revival. In “This Island on Which I Love You” McDougall writes, “This island is alive with love, its storms, the cough of alchemy / expelling every parasitic thing” (55). Harnessing the power of her history, McDougall champions change. Āina Hānau / Birth Land is addressed to a new generation — one born in an American Hawai’i — telling them that it was not always like this and does not have to continue so indefinitely.
Works Cited
McDougall, Brandy Nālani. Āina Hānau / Birth Land. The University of Arizona Press, 2023
Han, Stephanie (Host). (2023). The Conversation [Radio]. Hawai’i Public Radio. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/the- conversation/2023-03-07/hawaiis-newest-poet-laureate-speaks-on-her-fear-and-growth-as-a-writer
Felix Benson is a writer / editor from London, England. He studies in Glasgow, Scotland and is spending a year abroad in Montreal, Québec. He is an editor of fiction at the creative journal Scrivener, and a volunteer for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
22 April 2026