Hawaiian Chants

Video Find(s) of the Day

It was the first music I ever heard made. It was more powerful for coming from people than the music that came from machines. That's probably why wherever I go, whatever I do, the background music in my head always comes back to Hawaiian chants.

It's been really hard to find decent Hawaiian chant videos. But it's been getting better. Here are some I have found.

Strong Hawaiian Chant



Spike Jones - Hawaiian War Chant



Uliuli by Halau O Kekuhi



At 1:14 in the next video you can hear a version of the entirety of the Kaulilua song. I ran a translation of it in No Arguing Over Poi. These are the sounds in my head.

Chants and Stories from Hawaii

Cigarette Torture

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring and early summer of 1956, when I became 7. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I only spent a few boring days at Mina's house. Mina lived in a row house in Maryland, near Rock Creek. I was actually glad to see my parents, when they finally came to get me, just to be going some place that had books.

By the time I was back in Fort Devens, there was only a week left of 1st grade. It ended without further incident. I still have my report card. It shows the number of days I was absent each quintile of the school year except the last. For the last quintile that space is left blank. I believe I missed more than a month.

With the end of school I was still recovering from my injuries. The bandages came off my head first. My wrist continued to have to be in a sling for at least two more weeks.

One day, after some sexual abuse by my Mother, Alex told Kona how he could be summoned in an emergency. He said to just think of a certain line from an old Hawaiian song. It was one of the few lines that I could still remember after the surgery. It was a line which loosely translated meant, "please transport me to heaven."

A day or two later, as Kona, I sat down at the coffee table in the Sun Porch with paper and pencils and called Alex and asked him to sing for me, and help me draw. I needed help because he had to enable me to use the left hand. Ordinarily Kona drew with my right and Alex wrote with my left. Basically Kona needed Alex to allow Kona to guide his "writing" of pictures, and wanted Alex to sing along.

It was a meditative session, following the instructions in meditation that I remembered Lani and Lono giving me. I started with a seed drawing of a symbol representing a target state. My target was integration. The seed was two vertical lines joined by three parallel horizontal syzygies. I drew around it while chanting. I knew the chant was all wrong, but I hoped the magic would work anyway.

My Mother crept up on me, catching me in the act of chanting. She screamed at me. "How many times have we had to tell you not to use Hawaiian in the house!"

She demanded to know what I was drawing. I told her they were sleeping mat designs. She said she wasn't going to allow me to waste my life making sleeping mats or basket weaving "like useless ignorant natives." I had to get an education and a career, so she wouldn't have to support me forever.

Then she said, "I know what would put you in your place." She got a large envelope from her bedroom and threatened to show me the contents. She said there was an X-ray in it that would show me why she was so sure I was "on my way to being a basket-weaver." I didn't know what she was talking about at the time. It wasn't until I was almost 35 that I saw the X-ray she referred to. It was an X-ray taken upon my admission to Tripler Medical Center on my first birthday. It showed the extent of the brain damage I suffered that day.

She decided not to show me the X-ray. Instead, she suddenly shifted gears as she noticed that I was holding my pencil in my left hand. She said, "Show me how you've been drawing." When I drew a little with my left, she said, "So! You've switched personalities. Let's see, you used the left hand, that means the artist is in the right side of your head."

So she took me to the Play Deck and banged the right side of my head repeatedly on the brick wall there. The idea was to kill "the artist personality." She tried to do it so as not to leave any marks. After a while, she decided that wouldn't work. "If I don't do it hard enough to leave a mark I won't kill it either." So she brought me back to the Sun Porch and stuck the pencil back in my left hand and told me to draw. As soon as I drew a little she grabbed my left hand and burned the back of it with her cigarette.

When I stopped screaming, she said, "Draw some more." She threatened to beat me if I didn't. When I did, she burn the back of my left hand, being careful to burn it at the exact same place.

After that even threats wouldn't get me to draw for her. So every minute or so she took my hand with the pencil in it and forced it to draw a line, then burned the same spot.

She spent about half an hour at this, using up at least three cigarettes. Finally she said, "Are you going to use your left hand any more?" I told her I wouldn't. She said, "Good, maybe that personality won't get its way anymore."

Two or three months later I came home with a note from my teacher saying my penmanship had become terrible. My Mother said, "Why is your penmanship so bad suddenly? All through first grade you got high marks for penmanship. Your writing was beautiful."

I said, "Don't you remember? You made me stop using my left hand. That was the hand I was using to write with."

"No!" she said, "You were using it to draw with that day! That's what I remember. The artist was using the left hand!"

"I was only using it to draw then because I couldn't use my right hand, remember? It was in a sling."

"So what are you saying, you wrote with your left hand?'

"Sure. You didn't ever notice?"

She hadn't cared enough to notice before. Both my Mother and my Father wrote left-handed. My mother switched hands according to task, just like I did. She wrote with her left, used scissors with her right. But she couldn't be bothered to notice any of that, until she could see in it a justification for torture.

Punctuated Routines

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened from September, 1953, to March, 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The next six months at the House in Shirley, through Fall and most of Winter, were mostly uneventful. Or the events of one day were like the events of every other day with only a few exceptions.

I spent much of the time in a dream-like state, similar to the dream-state I experienced walking around Schofield Barracks when I was two and a half. Alex sang chants while Kona played, for hours each day. Indoors, because the weather turned cold.

The play was mainly ritual enactment, over and over again, of the Primary Rotating Dramatic Triangle. I'd have three stuffed toys. One would be the Villain. One would be the Victim. The Villain would attack the Victim. The third would be the Rescuer and saved the Victim. But in saving the Victim, the Rescuer would get carried away, and overdo it. So the old Rescuer would be the new Villain. The old Villain would be the new Victim. The old Victim would then become angry, and assume the role of Rescuer, and save the new Victim that had just before been his/her attacker. The triangle would have rotated 120 degrees. Then, the new Rescuer would overdo it, and the roles would rotate another 120 degrees. And then another.


Each rotation would take about ten minutes. All would go on mechanically, without comments, accompanied by Hawaiian chants. If a psychologist had got a chance to watch it I bet I would have been a famous case study. If I'd been filmed, I could have seen myself in Psych 101 doing that, with a voiceover telling me what a clear case of whatever it was my problem would be called. Maybe they'd have made up a special name for it. If the psychologist's name was Robert G Bozo, my behavior would have been called Bozo Disorder, or Bozo Syndrome.

That accounted for about 8 hours a day. There were a few other routines. My Mother taught me new words every day for a while. Then, out of the blue, I told her I wanted to learn numbers, too. She liked that. It made a lot of points with her. So she started me on counting, then adding, then subtracting.

One of the ways I practiced my counting was to count up the number of Hawaiian chants Alex could still remember at that time. Of the songs remembered in their entirety, the count was 12. One dozen exactly. I also remembered enough fragments of songs that I could guess that I had forgotten about an equal number. That inventory is what I'm drawing on when I say that I probably knew two dozen songs at one time.

My Mother let up on the rapes during this period. She made it a daily practice to fondle me to keep me from fondling myself. That was statutory rape, but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even interpret the genital fondling as sexual. I regarded it as physical maintenance, just like what she said it was. I hope people don't misunderstand that as an endorsement of her behavior. Just because it didn't bother me at the time doesn't mean it was justifiable. Later on, as I learned more about sex, I understood how I had been exploited by her, and the subsequent pain of betrayal has been very severe. I've been in therapy for over 20 years, and the hardest parts of my Mother's treatment of me to deal with has been the parts that caused the least distress at the time.

She still raped me anally, but it happened less often. I could avoid much of it by avoiding her. She would be set off by irritation and stress. My presence could add to that. I could prevent an incident by not adding to her irritation.

One day she broke from routine by dragging me around the house and raping me in every room. She was mildly angry, and mildly drunk. She told me the purpose of it was to show me that she was the boss of me everywhere in the house. It was her way of telling me that there were no safe places.

Another break in the routine: My, and Koko's, first big snow. We had a Massachusetts blizzard around the end of November. It was a lot of fun for both of us. Dad swore a lot, having to dig the car out of a foot and a half of snow, chain it, drive it the 800 feet to the highway, only to find that the plows had left an 8 foot wall of snow at the entrance of our driveway when they cleared the highway. He came up with some sort of theory to the effect that the transportation department had no right to do that, and screamed it at my Mother and me for hours.

Then there was an odd excursion to Fort Devens. My parents went to an officer's Christmas party, and left me with a simultaneous children's party that was held at the enlisted men's gym. There were a hundred or more children there, all left there by their parents for the same reason as me, so their parents could go to the same officer's party.

They started with a Punch and Judy puppet show, something like this video. I thought the violence was sickening. Too close to home?



Then there was a magic show, in which a women volunteered to have her head put in a box so that the magician could pretend to make her head vanish. It was obviously a trick of mirrors, but to me it was sick anyway to think that making someone's head disappear was a worthy activity.

Then there was a couple of hours of cartoons. I had never seen cartoons before and, again, I was grossed out by the violence. I was amazed that the other kids laughed and enjoyed it.

Normal Life As Two People

My Mother was very happy to have Alex back. The bodily dysfunction problem went away instantly with his return. Less work for her. She was so happy she probably tolerated his Hawaiian singing more than ever. I was now allowed to sing Hawaiian chants any time my Father was gone, so long as I didn't do it with her in the room.

The other rule was, no mention of Alex. I was to call myself "Wesley" no matter who I thought I was, not only with my Father. I think she was afraid of letting me get used to it, for fear that I'd do it in front of my Father and he'd go ballistic.

As Kona, I really appreciated the Hawaiian chants. My Mother was never much interested in music or radio talk, so she never played the radio or the record player when my Father was at work. So the weeks without Alex were filled with long hours of silence.

I should say something more here about the separation between Kona and Alex. When Alex was in full control, Kona would shut down, and have no memory of what happened. From Kona's point of view it would be like a ambulatory blackout. He'd wake up to discover having done things while unconscious. When Kona was in full control Alex might loss consciousness or might not, but either way, when Alex was back in control, he knew everything that happened.

It wasn't always necessary for one or the other to be in clear control. So, for example, when Kona was playing with his toys, Alex could be singing. Alex's use of the vocal equipment didn't require complete control.

When Alex wanted to sing Kona would feel a momentary choking sensation, first, as the control of the throat changed over. It was unpleasant but brief. When it was done, Kona could go about his playing and a song would come out of his mouth, sung by Alex. Sometimes Alex would also take over just the left hand and slap the floor for a drum accompaniment.

I suppose that sounds creepy to a lot of people, but it was just life as normal to me when I was 4.

Last Chant Learned

The last new chant I learned was the Kamanomano chant. There was an unusual prolonged torrential downpour that drove Lani and I indoors. We were in the gymnasium near the tennis courts. Lono was off somewhere else. I begged Lani to sing a chant and he lost patience and reminded me that the chants are spiritual. You just don't sing them any place, any time.

I must have looked really hurt and made him feel horribly guilty, because he immediately came up with a chant that he could feel comfortable singing in a gym. Years later I found it performed twice on tracks 13 & 14 of the Smithsonian Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants album. It was translated by Mary Pukui in the notes this way:

1. 'Eia o Kalani Kamanomano
[Here is the heavenly one Kamanomano]

2. Kamanomano heke o ke kapu
[The highest and strictest of the tabus]

3. Ka honu pe'ekua wakawaka
[The thick horny shelled turtle]

4. Pip'i ka unahi ma ke kua
[With scales up the back]

5. Hiolo ka unahi ma ke alo
[And scales that come down the front]

6. Ma ka maha 'opi o Kalani
[Along the sides of the heavenly one]

7. Kalani ka hiapo, kama kapu
[The first born, a tabu child]

8. Hānau mua o Hawai'i
[First born chief in Hawai'i]

9. Ka 'īlio nūkea ma ka lani
[A snout raised up to the heavens]

10. 'Eia la ke 'o nei
[Lo, here he is!

Lani's interpretation was unusually clear and specific. He said it was about something you could see in the sky at night. He gave a different translation of line 6, saying it meant, "in the cleft temple of the sky." That referred to a place where the Milky Way appeared to separate and return to itself. So it isn't a constellation, but a relative void of stars. The song is describing it as looking like a fabulous long necked turtle with snout raised and jewels sprinkled over and under it, and suggesting that he is an apparition of a great ancestor.

He touched the right side of my head at my temple, to explain the meaning of the word "maha." The touch reminded me of the car's strike, and it burned Lani's meaning into me.

E Hele Mai

Back to the day in mid-to-late October 1951 when I met the two dark-skinned men. The one who first spoke to me was my new best friend within minutes. He introduced me to the other as such, and the other look worried, and walked away, like he wanted nothing to do with me. The first one shrugged. Then they started off together.

I followed as they walked along the each of the field, until we reached one of the avenues I wouldn't cross. Seeing how I hung back, my friend said "E hele mai". When I didn't come to him he returned to take my hand, and walked me across the street.

For the next few hours I followed them around while they worked. They were groundskeepers. They worked at the recreational fields, and the gymnasium, and tennis courts, and took care of plantings along the avenues. They set up sprinklers, trimmed plants, picked up litter, and washed walls. They were a crew of two. No one else ever joined them.

Whenever they spoke together they spoke the musical language. Occasionally the friend would add something in English to me. I actually thought at the time that it was all one language. The musical language was just a part of English I hadn't heard before.

Periodically, as they worked, the aloof one would begin singing, or you might call it chanting. Sometimes the other one would join in, at other times it would just be the one. For a taste of it, listen to Charles Ka'upu for the first two minutes of this video. With your eyes closed, imagine a skinny 18-year old is singing, dressed in a brown uniform while another one is listening.



They took a long break at one point, and shared lunch with me. After the lunch, the aloof one sang while the other one beat two sticks together, sometimes calling out the beginning of lines. I don't remember any dancing that day, but some of the singing sounded like what you hear in the next video. There was dancing like this in days to come.



Finally late in the afternoon my friend walked me back across the avenue and said goodbye. They had to go. I was sad. I thought I would never see them again. But the next day when I did my route I made sure to look for them at the same avenue crossing, and they were there.

I abandoned my Quest for the school. Best quest I ever failed at! From then on I followed the young men around at work so much every weekday I learned their routine. I would pick up sprinklers and move them before they would get around to it. They began calling me "Alaka'i", leader, boss. I learned my friend's name was Lono, and the aloof one was Lani. I started picking up new alternative words for such things as work, water, and plants.