How to Swallow a Colonizer

How to Swallow a ColonizerOr, What I Learned from Haunani-Kay Trask No'u Revilla (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The following essay was originally delivered as a talk for a virtual poetry workshop for the Department of Race & Resistance Speaker Series at San Francisco State University in 2022. Gratitude inspires reciprocity. We build the future together. And we cannot—should not—build without our ancestors and our mentors. With humility, I build a bit of future alongside you by expressing aloha for an 'Ōiwi (Hawaiian) poet who loved her country fearlessly. I am a lifetime student of Haunani-Kay Trask, an 'Ōiwi aloha 'āina who fought for her lāhui (nation) when both the idea of a sovereign Hawai'i and the idea of an 'Ōiwi woman going toe-to-toe against white supremacy and settler patriarchy were unthinkable. Too often, the truth is that we cannot be what we cannot see. Representation matters. Our teachers are foundational. In the summer of 2021, Hawai'i mourned, because Haunani-Kay Trask passed from our world. In 1993, one hundred years after the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai'i by a group of American thugs and a ship of American soldiers, Haunani-Kay Trask spoke to a crowd of hundreds of Hawaiians, hungry in all the ways a people can be hungry. "We are not American!" she chanted, gripping the mic. "We are not American! We are not American! We will never be Americans. We will die as Hawaiians." Haunani taught me how to claim my ancestors without shame. When I read Haunani's poetry, I learn how anger, pride, and ecstasy can live on the same page—not as a broken treaty or an eviction notice but as a poem. A poem that can live as a small rock in your chest until you've learned how to breathe better, how to dream better, until you're ready, as Audre Lorde tells us, to transform silence into language and action, ready to spit that rock on the page or the stage, and ready to be, as Haunani taught us, "raw, swift, and deadly." [End Page 34] When I read Haunani's poetry, I learn how to love better. How to stand taller as an aloha 'āina. How to say "no." And to trust my "no" as a complete sentence: Not today, colonizer. No. What do you need help saying no to? Who taught you your "no"? What happens to your body when you say "yes" and mean it? That's a kind of aloha. Haunani taught me that aloha is rage and rapture. She taught me the complexity of that "and," which was all but shamed out of us by missionaries. As for so many other island nations, the history of missionaries in Hawai'i is violent and insidious. The toxic binary between one god brought by foreigners and our many gods born from our 'āina was a lesson in fear. We were taught to turn away from the abundance of our kūpuna (elders and ancestors). We were taught to feel saved by scarcity. We were taught to shame our beautiful brown bodies and the beautiful brown things we did with other beautiful brown bodies in our sovereign beautiful brown dirt. As more missionaries settled in Hawai'i, light and dark were rendered as antithetical. In order to cultivate a better home for the single male Christian god, light and dark were increasingly defined by opposition. In other words, American settler colonialism perverted my ancestors' sense of dark and consequently corrupted our relationship to light. So now I'm thumbing through every metaphor I've penned for light and dark. Rage and rapture. Asking myself: does this corruption live inside me or do I refuse the inheritance? Is my "no" strong enough, daily enough as a queer femme 'Ōiwi poet? This was never and will never be an issue of morality; it is a crisis of relation. I share this with you because I want to read a poem by Haunani-Kay Trask that baffled me as an undergraduate. When I first came across this poem, I was thick in what was then

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