Spahr: Colonial Guilt and Feeling Better About It

Juliana Spahr’s poetry highlights the concepts and the issues of belonging and of owning in “Some of We and the Land that was Never Ours.” The speaker identifies and categorizes the subjects, “some of we,” into multiple categories in which those who worked the land, described by the speaker as “[s]ome of we wore the land,” “[s]ome of we carried the ground“ are distinct from those who were foreigners, “[s]ome of we were to settle. Some of we were to arrange.” For those who settle, the speaker asserts “the land was never ours . . . [n]ever to be owned” (12). These assertions are reminiscent of ancient Hawaiian culture, in which the Hawaiians did not have the same concept of ownership as modern Westerners. In this way, Spahr gives cultural authority to the Natives and aligns herself with them as an ally; her alignment with native Hawaiians is present in other poems in the book as well, such as the detail of the role of invasive species, which she portrays negatively in “Sonnets,” and an exploration of her colonial/white guilt in “Dole Street.” The poem “Some of We . . . “ acts as an introduction to her exploration in this sense--the foreigners claimed ownership of land that could not be owned, and that they definitely did not own, nor have any rights thereof until it was taken (a verb she uses in “Things of Each Possible Relation . . .”) by force.

Spahr explores white/colonial guilt in “Dole Street,” a poem named after the street on which she lived that was named after a white annexationist.  The poem begins with the story of the twin rain spirits who give the Hawaiians fresh water, which “eventually attracts foreigners who do not respect the water, who plant water lilies from afar in it, who build a church overlooking it,” reiterating the narrative of arrangement and change (45-6). A native Hawaiian story is used to illustrate the Native belief, deliberately setting it against the “taking” done by the foreigners, who end up destroying with their lack of respect. The speaker then announces, “I am a part of Dole Street’s swirl of connection whether I like it or not” and that “[a]s the stereotypical continental schoolteacher, I need to think about how to respect the water that is there, how to not suck it all up with my root system” (47, 49). She is guilty because she benefits from the colonialism that forced Western education onto the island, but she navigates through guilt by respecting natives and by asserting that she must be responsible and use her Western privilege to acknowledge the destructive and oppressive effects that colonialism had on Hawaii.