Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific ed. by Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Georganne Nordstrom (review)

Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific breaks new ground as the first book-length, collaborative exploration of Pacific literary and artistic rhetorics and aesthetics. Foundational anthologies, such as Lali: A Pacific Anthology (Wendt 1980) and Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980 (Wendt 1995), offer a broad and representative sampling of literature throughout the Pacific, relying on English as a common language for contributors and readers. More recent anthologies have embraced the multilingual realities of the Pacific but focus on the complexities within a single island group. Since 1995, Huia Press has published its series of biennial award-winning prose as both the English-language Huia Short Stories and the companion Māori-language Ngā Pakiwaitara a Huia, while collections like Vārua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia (Stewart, Mateata-Allain, and Mawyer 2006) move effortlessly between Reo Mā‘ohi, French, and English in a single volume. Among Huihui’s many strengths is the dexterity with which it weaves the diverse languages and locations of Moana Nui into one book. The twenty-four chapters include texts translated from indigenous and settler languages, texts presented in the original language alongside English, and texts that move imperceptibly from one language to another—often without translations. The resultant seamless compilation successfully engages the reader while also emphasizing that narrative and meaning making in the Pacific are multivalent and layered.

The accumulation of diverse languages and locations, coupled with variations in genre, are themselves one layer of the metaphor(s) around which the anthology is organized. “Huihui,” as editors Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Georganne Nordstrom note, is a Proto-Polynesian word that can be translated as a pooling or collection; they also read the term through a specifically Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) lens, invoking the multiple kaona (hidden meanings) and descriptions of the constellation Pleiades, of which Huihui is but one name. Huihui, as both collective and constellation, guides the text’s navigation of rhetorics and aesthetics. The term is both extensive and inclusionary, but also quite specific—just as the focus on rhetorics and aesthetics, the editors argue, should be. They endorse a culturally and geographically located understanding of these terms, which when left unspecified often reinforce colonial hierarchies through an implicit reference to Euro-Western norms. They note that the current modification of the terms “rhetoric” and “aesthetic” as, for instance, “minority” or “alternative,” usually marginalizes literary traditions and finds them lacking through an implicit comparison to Euro-Western ideals. Invoking the multiple intersections of art and politics, the editors argue that “by recognizing the rhetorical and aesthetic sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific, Huihui contributes to the overturning of these hegemonic structures and the promoting of decolonization” (6).

Drawing on “Makali‘i, or the fine mesh or ‘tiny eyes’ of the constellation Pleiades … [as] the essential fabric of an organism,” the first section of the book focuses on identity as an entry point to rhetorics and aesthetics as constructed practices (7). Kalena Silva’s “A Contemporary Response to Increasing Mele Performance Contexts” traces how language revitalization has been integral to the resurgence of evolving and reemerging traditional practices in Hawai‘i. His description of the collaborative composition process and the overview of specifically Kanaka Maoli poetic devices, or meiwi, creates a fuller understanding of how poetic language based in indigenous perspectives furthers cultural and political sovereignty. If Silva shows us the potential of reclaiming an identity that has been forcefully excised or merely eroded over time, Selina Tustitala Marsh’s “Un/Civilized Girls, Unruly Poems: Jully Makini (Solomon Islands)” alternatively examines how one’s identity may be wrested from its overlapping and sometimes competing components. Focusing on personal identity in the context of an emergent nation, Makini’s poems pose...