Attempt to analyze an excerpt of "Name Chant for Naihe"

Before I begin, I humbly admit to the suppositional nature of this analysis. It is, when all is said and done, an attempt to access something in such a way as to engender its potential to be discussed amongst us.

“They reverberated in the heavens; the voice / Of the chiefly thunder rolled above. / Meehonua, son of Kamalalawalu was the / man / His was the inshore surf of Mahini, / The turbulent [surf] of the woman Manini, / Turbulent laid Manini in the sun; / Manini the fish was bleached there, / Like the bleachesd tapa cloths of the / women. / To him belonged the surfboard / On which to ride the waves, / He whose wave it was, reached the shore.” (qtd. 37-38 Moser)

     This “name chant” or mele largely carries on in this fashion, first describing a person and then a place where the person performs some action, moving about through the islands in panorama-graphically adjectival splendor as a vehicle for folding lineage and place into each other. The two, people and land, become mnemonically and thus culturally inseparable--pre-colonial Hawaii was orally historical, history is always an activity which makes culture, and memory is always essential for the preservation of oral texts.

     This device then, in keeping with the cultural approach it communicates and from which it emerges, must inform the audience by more than depicting a man as owning a specific coastal location. This is seen in the specifications which identify the location; they are not merely topological indices, but cultural typifications, "he turbulent [surf] of the woman Manini, / Turbulent laid Manini in the sun; / Manini the fish was bleached there, / Like the bleachesd tapa cloths of the / women." so that the man is not an owner of the location in a sense of the western metaphor which encodes control and exclusive privilege, but he “owns” in the sense of  that he utilizes the place well for his purpose, and is the best at utilizing the place for that purpose. But what of what follows? 

“The wild duckling flew, / casting a shadow on the full moon. / As though to inquire of me, it flew on, / It moved to the wise and learned / Kahakumaka / Kakaunioa [and] Kamakaihiwa. / The skin was dampened by the rapid / movement / Of the living man.” (qtd. 38 Moser)

     Summiting the exterior will never be enough for me, but all that comes to mind are zen koans and the ideas which I tried to catch into shore by the paragraphs previous (to be trope-ical); so, I will approach it from the idea that the form of the poem is a contrivance to perpetuate the conceptual connection of place and people by praxis. 

     The duck’s flight’s continuation is an inquiry in that it extends the horizon of the person-place concept beyond the author’s sight. A question is always the mere presentation of a discernible lack, of an absence, a something beyond sight, beyond knowledge. This arena of the unknown is acknowledged, but the duck is not lost. It returns, miraculously, again to the place where everything is safely contextualized in its relational physicality and culture. That, “The skin was dampened by the rapid / movement / Of the living man.” reminds the audience of its corporeality by referring to its most obvious physical feature, the skin, and one way that the skin operates, sweating. The bodies water mixing with the ocean. That, “It moved to the wise and learned...” returns the audience to the cultural context because a person can only be wise and learned in a cultural context. The human paragon of solitude cannot be understood as wise or foolish, only mistaken or correct.