Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha 'Aina, and Ea

Read this for a book club with a colleague who does mental health consulting work in Hawai'i, and is feeling increasingly conflicted about her presence there - what exactly can a colonial modality of healing practiced in an illegally occupied place do for greater wellness? Anyway, I'm very grateful to have read this. I read slowly, because Osorio approaches the sticky (to put it mildly) issue of translation with “rigorous paraphrase” (I really appreciated her explication of this approach), but I enjoyed the frequent stops to look up Hawaiian words she leaves untranslated to see both how I could understand them in part through Osorio's context, and also feel hints of the ways that I might not be grasping the meaning and resonance they have when they are fully embedded in the language and worldview of their creation. My 4-star rating is related to my fit as a reader of this work, not its quality or power: Osorio notes that readers unfamiliar with more than the basics of Hawaiian history and culture may be best served getting more introductory context elsewhere, which I'm sure is true, and it is a little challenging to read books that include chapters that were dissertations, because dissertations are challenging to read! But back to the book: it's hard to summarize what Osorio has accomplished, except to say that I experienced it as an ‘upena of poetry, legend, Indigenous activism, and queer theory that speaks movingly to Native Hawaiians' love of and reciprocal obligation to the land and each other, and what understanding intimacy in this context might mean for Hawai'i's future and decolonial movements in other areas of the world, as well.

Side note: Osorio is, as a poet, also a very powerful speaker, and there are several great All My Relations episodes in which she and other nonviolent activists share their resistance work related to safeguarding Mauna Kea that I highly recommend.