Community Art Gallery

from Grrrl Couch Vol. #8: A Year in Quarantine

Letter From The Editor

Written by Esme Yokooji

In Miyako, during ancient times an epidemic swept across our land. After much prayer, my people were met with the Paantu Punaha who came from far-off shores to relieve us of our suffering. There was UyaPaantu, Nnaka- Paantu, and FfaPaantu, all three donning imposing masks and covered in mud and foliage. They brought an end to the sickness in the mud, which they painted onto the bodies of our people. We received the mud gratefully and jubilantly and still do. I receive the mud in any way that I can in Hawaiʻi, when I find myself sat in a loʻi shaded by the growing Kalo surrounded by women who have wrapped me in sisterhood it feels medicinal. It feels ancient and sacred to hold space as we hold the land and as the land holds us back. In the mud, I feel the dirt and grime of the past year slowly wash away.

Diseases of epidemic proportions are nothing new to these islands or the islands of my ancestors.

In the memoir Hawaiʻiʻs Story by Hawaiʻiʻs Queen, Queen Liliʻuokalani recounts a smallpox outbreak in 1881. In response to the virulence of the disease, the then Princess swiftly and decisively closed down the ports and instituted a mandatory quarantine for those afflicted (much to the displeasure of sugar growers and foreign merchants). I read the Queen’s story as the islands began to swell with chaos and the epidemic began to situate itself on our shores. The ʻōlelo noʻeau “ ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope, “ situates the future as the ʻtime in backʻ and the past as the ʻtime in front,ʻ it is a common ideological thread across Oceania. In Aotearoa the whakataukī 8is Kia whakatōmuri te

haere whakamua, which literally refers to walking backwards into the past with eyes on the future. As I studied the past and walked into the future, I realized the magnitude of our present deficits as they unfolded. Instead of sugar growers and missionary’s sons bearing bayonets, it was disheartened white men storming their own capital, but the same groups of people were disproportionately dying and once again haole people brought with them a new and terrifying pestilence. Some patterns in our history remain stubborn, like creases that refuse to fall to an iron. Yellow peril and antiblackness persisted like heinous weeds cracking through bandaids of pavement, and neocolonialism boomed at the doorsteps of afflicted islands across Oceania. Our shores were free to tourists and military personnel who acted with a reckless entitlement and boldness befitting of their ancestry. Insta-colonizers took up occupancy in Airbnbs and quickly profiteered off of “paradise” as our houseless struggled to find ways to keep clean and disinfect without having reliable access to running water. I saw so much selfishness. When I will tell the story of the pandemic I will tell the story of selfish of people who came to be here through privilege and access and those who chose to invest in whiteness and a seat at the table at the expense of other people’s lives. I will never forget how the government tried to move forward on desecrating the iwi kūpuna in Hūnānāniho during the pandemic, I will never forget how we were forced to bear RIMPAC during the pandemic, I will never forget how the U.S. military caused outbreaks in Guåhan and Okinawa and Hawai’i. I will never forget how in Okinawa they began to remove soil with the remains of our war dead in order to fill in our sacred waters with the hopes of building a military base on top of this desecration sandwich. I am bitter, so bitter that so many struggled and died needlessly; that these islands experience yet another tragedy upon the already gargantuan shoulders of displacement and land theft and illegal occupation. I will also never forget the incandescent and wonderful way that Waikīkī looked without tourists, the way it felt to see local and Hawaiian people chilling with their families at the beach and at the countless trails that were usually so crowded. In a strange way, the pandemic offered a glimpse into a future waiting. A future that could be if we only sought after it and coaxed it into being. I turned my hands to the earth as so many others did, in the midst of the uncertainty. It was more than a fluke, it was an instinct. I sought out healing mud, I sought out healing waters, and more than anything I sought the past. Colonization is so effective because when you are made to forget your native tongue you forget the stories of your people, you are forced to forget the things that truly matter and hold meaning so you can invest in false idols like Capitalism, Tourism, and whiteness. I caught a sliver of a future where Hawaiʻi is independent, where we grow our own food, where Hawaiian people make decisions about Hawaiian land. It is not a fleeting future, but one rooted firmly in the past.

TO THE

COMMUNITY

Left page

top left: Sam Herrera; top right: Giuliana Lorenzini; middle left: Sam Herrera; middle right: Ally Frank; bottom left: Sam Herrera; bottom right: Ally Frank