Tiki, or Ki'i

I followed Lani's progress closely as he worked his carving every day. It was slow; he only worked on it during lunch for at most five minutes any given day. Some days he wouldn't work on it at all. He would appear to meditate on it. I eventually found out he wasn't working on it except at lunches. He wouldn't say why.

Lani's carving was a ki'i. That's Hawaiian for "tiki".

People think tiki are idols. Here are six tiki or ki'i:


Ki'i are images. They can be drawings, diagrams or sculptures. They can be visages or representations of visages. They can be accurate or schematic, abstract or concrete, realistic or symbolic. The word tiki, or ki'i means image, not idol.

By the way, the one above that looks like an idol, at the lower right, is a symbolic expressionistic image of a Maori ancestor, and is no more an idol than Michelangelo's realistic but equally imaginary portrayal of Adam at the upper left.

Reconciliation

I got surgery for a ruptured penis. Even though I was under a general anesthesia I woke up from it with dreams of horrific pain. I dreamed my body was being sawn in half from the crotch up, with dreamed pain to match. That pain I remember.

When it was over and I could go home, I had to wear a cup for a month or two.

My Father drove me home from the hospital, and for the next two weeks took care of me. My Mother wasn't around. When I asked about her, my Father just said she's resting up in the hospital.

My Father got to know me more in those two weeks than he had in a year. I felt a bond forming.

At the same time, I wanted to get back to Lani and Lono. I believed that all the horrible things that had happened since I stopped seeing them happened just because of that. If I had not turned away from them I wouldn't have taken up with Jackson. If I hadn't taken up with Jackson my Mother wouldn't be in the hospital.

But my Father wasn't negligent in the way my Mother was. He wouldn't let me run off for hours in a day. I had to stay by the house while he was taking care of me.

I had a birthday coming up, in July. My Father asked me what I wanted most, and I told him I wanted a ball. I had in mind a rubber bouncing ball like one I'd seen Jackson play with. Dad said it would be easy to get me a ball, and asked me what else I wanted. The only thing I could think of was to beg him to go to Stoneman Field with me so he could meet my friends. He said, no, he was too old to meet my friends. When I told him my friends were big people too, he just laughed, like he didn't believe me.

Finally, the two weeks were up and my Mother came home.

In those days mental patients often had to dress just like convicts in a penitentiary. That's the way my Mother was when she stepped out of the car. She was wearing striped pajamas with big black and white stripes so she couldn't get far without being seen if she ever escaped. Her head had been shaved and was still bandaged.

As she came in the house I stood waiting. I'd been coached by my Father to say "I love you Mommy." I squeaked my line out as she glared at me. She said, "Get the fuck out of my way, you filthy freak. I don't want to ever see you again. You did this to me." She went to bed and didn't come out for the weekend.

Then the weekend was over, and my Father had to go back to work. That morning I ran off to see Lani and Lono.

When I saw them I rejoined them in tears. I told Lani I was sorry for being angry with him, and he was right, I should be outside the kapu, I wasn't meant to live like normal people.

Lani told me that he was the one who had been wrong. It was wrong of him, he said, to laden me with all his hopes and dreams and not consider my needs, and it was wrong to talk about the old ways as if they were perfect and the way things should be now.

He said he had already known that the kapu was wrong, but he was just clinging to everything, and you can't do that. Some of the old ways are best left dead.

I told them everything that had gone wrong during the month since I'd last seen them. Then Lani took out a piece of wood he was carving, and got ready to work on it. It was a different piece than I'd seen him working on before. He said he'd been saving it in the hopes of seeing me again, he wanted me to watch him carve it from the beginning.

I asked what it was going to be. He said some sort of animal. He said it would be a gift for a special little brother. I said I didn't know he had a little brother, that I thought the one he had died. He said this is for a different little brother. Then he started carving, while Lono sang a chant.

Rise Up! Seize the Cookie!

At home I observed my Father in uniform and later described his insignia to my Ni'ihau friends. They told me my Father was a Captain. They were clearly impressed. The word for Captain in Hawaiian is Alaka'i, which also means boss or supervisor, the only name they had for me. They pointed out the connection, and suggested I was taking after my Father already. I had thoughts of becoming a soldier.

I asked if they ever wanted to be soldiers. Lono said he might, for a while, but eventually he wanted to study English more and teach school. This one remark was very important to me. What's English? The language of Britain and of the U.S., where I was from, they said. Not Hawai'ian, but a separate language. It was a revelation that took a while to absorb. There was also a reminder of school. I learned where I would have found it. It was almost twice as far as I had searched.

Lani said he wanted to be an artist. He took a carving out of his pocket and showed it to me. It didn't look like anything but a lump of wood, but he said in time it would look like an animal. When I asked what animal, he said whatever it wanted.

I remember at the time being more interested in Lono's goals than in Lani's. It was about this time though that I learned they were brothers. Lono said they were non-identical twins. They were born at the same time to the same Mother. But they were so different. Lono was so extroverted. Lani was quiet and distant.

At home I had a new kind of problem. The new dog Koko was getting cookies all the time, but my Mother still was not feeding me when my Father was at at work. I was beginning to reach the point where I could start to pronounce English but the words wouldn't come out. I was sure that if I could tell my Mother what was wrong everything would be solved.

I came up with the idea of translating Hawaiian into English. I worked for a long time and came up with the sentence, "If dog gets cookie, boy gets cookie." I tried it out the next time my Mother was dishing out cookies to Koko.

It was probably January, 1952. I'm sure it was after Christmas. I was 2 and a half and it was 18 months after my first word. My Mother's jaw dropped open. Her eyes opened wide. Then she smiled, gave me a cookie and said, "All you ever had to do was ask."

When I told Lani and Lono about it they were stunned, too. Not that I had spoken English, but that I hadn't been doing so. This was they first they knew of it.

It was already decided that I couldn't follow them all day and distract them from their work. Now they laid down a rule that the hour's lunchtime would be divided into equal halves. The first thirty minutes of each lunch break would consist of Lono and I practicing our English. The second thirty minutes would be all three of us speaking or singing Hawaiian.

Lunches were at 11am to noon. I was taught just enough about telling time to know when it was getting close to 11.

About this time, I began to feel bad that my friends were always bringing food to the lunches and I never had any to bring. I think I was picking up on the Hawaiian value of uku, reciprocity. So I worked out how to say, "Want cookies for friends."

Once again, mother was stunned. This time, it was that I had friends. She asked a lot of questions, but I couldn't answer any of them because I hadn't prepared. The only thing I could do was nod yes when she asked if they were bigger. I could only say sentences I'd worked on and practiced for an hour or so. Finally though she agreed to give me a bag of cookies.

A typical day would consist of me getting up around daybreak, playing by myself in the house or close by while my Mother slept off the previous night's drunk. Then around 10:15 or so, I would go into her bedroom and start yelling, "E Māmā, e ala e! E ala ala e!" Once she was up, she give me a bag of cookies for my friends. She knew they were older kids, but had in mind 4 or 5 year-olds, 6 year-olds, maybe. She never dreamed I was meeting 18 year-olds for lunch every day.