Description - Unwritten Literature of Hawaii by Nathaniel B Emerson
The hula - the dance, with its songs and ceremonies - stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoyment. Besides this it kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcanic goddess Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time hula we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry.
This epic of Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a story addressed not to the closet reader, but to the eye and ear and heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the oli; but it must be noted that in every species of Hawaiian poetry - mele - whether epic, or eulogy, or prayer, sounding through them all we shall find the lyric note.
The most telling record of a people's intimate life is the record which it unconsciously makes in its songs. This record which the Hawaiian people have left of themselves is full and specific. When, therefore, we ask what emotions stirred the heart of the old-time Hawaiian as he approached the great themes of life and death, of ambition and jealousy, of sexual love, conjugal love, and parental love; what his attitude toward nature and the dread forces of earthquake and storm, and the mysteries of spirit and the hereafter-we shall find our answer in the songs and prayers and recitations of the hula.
The hula, it is true, has been unfortunate in the mode and manmer of its introduction to us moderns. An institution of divine, that is, religious, origin, the hula has in modern times wandered so far and fallen so low that foreign and critical esteem has come to associate it with the riotous and passionate ebullitions of Polynesian kings and the voluptuous posturings of their flesh-pots. We must, however, make a just distinction between the gestures and bodily contortions presented by the men and women, the actors in the hula, and their uttered words. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau." In truth the actors in the hula no longer suit the action to the word. The utterance harks back to the golden age; the gestures are trumped up by the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is oft times a sealed casket....
-American Anthropologist, Vol. 8
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