Where Spouting Waters Ebb
A new book historicizes a place that is now as fictive as it is real: Waikiki
by Marcia Morse / 11-15-2006
Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering
Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser
University of Hawai‘i Press, 200pp, $29
Waikiki: it is a potent name, one that evokes associations—fond or poignant—for the indigenous community, resident settlers and visitors alike. But which “Waikiki” does each of us know or remember? I’ve lived here long enough to remember the Uluniu, a women’s swim club to which my mother belonged. It sat (on prime beachfront property) between the Outrigger Canoe Club (before it moved down the avenue) and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, with grounds that then stretched unimpeded from the ocean to Kalakaua Avenue. Some childhood days ended with a swim in the late afternoon light, skin still slightly salty after a cold shower, eating chicken hekka on the lanai, eyelids and limbs growing loose with impending sleep.
That Waikiki, like my childhood, is long gone. I have also come to understand that the Waikiki I remember, much of it now covered over with graceless artifacts of concrete, was itself a project of erasure—perhaps more benign, but no less irreversible. If I indulge in such reminiscence, it is because I am invited to do so by Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering, whose authors Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser construct this place as one in which memories are always nascent, but sometimes still-born.
Chan, noted photographer and current chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa, and Andrea Feeser, writer and art historian formerly at UH-Manoa and now at Clemson University, make it clear from the outset that this, for all its elegant production and graphic appeal, is not your usual coffee-table book. The book itself re-enacts something of the seductive quality of its subject; the book itself becomes a souvenir of a place now as fictive as it is real. As the authors note, “What you will view, read and ponder is therefore an adventure through place and time that in many ways is like Waikiki itself: an entity that unfurls as a particular kind of space with a specific sort of vision, built upon and shaped by layers of history and interpretation…In the following chapters, you will certainly encounter a great deal of beauty and pleasure, but you will experience it alongside brutality and pain.”
Chan has put to superb use her gift for finding photographic material and putting it into new contexts. Some images, like the rice paddies in front of Diamond Head, may seem familiar, perhaps because they have become part of a collective history. Others, like the Royal Hawaiian Hotel foregrounded by barbed wire, or the Natatorium, rupturing the otherwise undeveloped beachfront, are used strategically to underscore a cumulative narrative. Feeser’s carefully researched and documented text, an evocative fusion of the poetic and the polemic, makes clear that Waikiki, “place of spouting waters,” continues to serve as a site of contestation, where both its physical space and its defining narrative have been made, unmade, remade. While many stories of Hawai‘i are written on the land, the authors’ story of Waikiki is written in its waters and, in particular, in the consequences of the hubris that propelled the draining or rechanneling of its waters, the construction of the Ala Wai Canal, and the radical transformation of an ecologically balanced environment into tourism-centered real estate.
The place we know as Waikiki, extending from Diamond Head to Ala Moana, was historically composed of several areas with distinctive features and historical significance. The authors preserve the rich complexity of this area, once home to a self-sustaining community that engaged in both agriculture and aquaculture, by telling the story of each region, using it as a thematic as well as geographic locus. Le‘ahi (Diamond Head), our quintessential landmark, has sheltered heiau and bunkers, battlegrounds and botanical gardens. In Kalia, at the ‘ewa end, numerous fishponds gave way to the Hilton Hawaiian Village and Fort DeRussy; the story of Kalia meshes with the story of the military presence in the islands.
We also learn, in turn, of Kawehewehe, Helumoa, Uluniu, Kaluaokau, Hamohamo, Kaneloa and Kapua—those areas carry other names now, but their stories resurface in this book. While it begins as a lamentation, it ends with a plea for responsible engagement and stewardship of a place still invested with significant mana and magic. It also ends on a note colored by hope—as attentive readers will observe—that the waters that once nourished Waikiki will rise again to infuse our memory.
The article can be viewed online at http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/story-continued/2006/11/where-spouting-waters-ebb
