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NĀ PUKE - BOOKS
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“Entry Gate,” Old Mission Cemetery, Honolulu, O'ahu, silver gelatin print - Photo: Courtesy of Reid S. Yalom |
Grave situation revisited
American Resting Place by Marilyn Yalom crisscrosses the American landscape of cemeteries – with a hop across the Pacific to include a chapter on Hawai'i – to express this singular theme: Traditional burial practices for so long showcased the ethnic diversity of communities but are quickly becoming eclipsed by a 21st century impulse to sterilize and homogenize gravesites. With photos by her son Reid Yalom and a rich weave of local informants, Yalom tells a remarkable story that effectively juxtaposes contemporary skittishness about death against a polyglot of traditions where the loss of a loved was expected to inspire fellowship among the living.
This has also been the storyline of Nannette Napoleon, whose research on post-contact cemeteries in the Hawaiian Islands is cited in Yalom's Hawai'i chapter. Napoleon is perhaps best known locally for her graveyard walking tours, where she presents tombstones as touchstones for family memories. “I grew up in a time when trips to grandparents' graves were all-day outings. We would picnic, make lei and tell stories about our long-gone relatives, so that it was a way to come together.”
Napoleon admits that her fascination with cemeteries began when she was a college student in Paris, far from her Native Hawaiian family (including her Beachboy Dad – Nappy Napoleon, whose 1995 funeral included a canoe paddlers' tribute off Waikīkī.) In French mausoleums, the young Napoleon found both elegant architecture of angels and intriguing inscriptions. “Back in Hawai'i, I became a student of graveyards, amazed by the things that tombstones could tell us about the way history affected our forebears,” she said. Case in point: Clusters of child-parent tombstones in Island graveyards from the early 1920s attest to the virulence of the era's Spanish flu epidemic of the era that encircled the globe and often wiped out whole families.
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In 1998, Napoleon authored O'ahu Cemetery, an artfully photographed book on a final resting place in shady Nu'uanu. More recently, she has taken up encouraging other Native Hawaiians to follow in her graveyard touring footsteps as a way to reconstruct family genealogies, which may be difficult to document in written records.
Despite a shared avocation for tales from the tomb, Napoleon and Yalom have never met. However, this will change in August thanks to Mission Houses Museum's use of Yalom's American Resting Place as a focal point for several activities, including Yalom's upcoming visit to Hawai'i and book-signing that will coincide with her participation in a panel discussion moderated by Napoleon. (See inset for information.)
Mission Houses Museum has its very own graveyard kuleana as the official caretaker for Missionary Cemetery adjacent to museum property. Yalom's book highlights the stones of missionaries found here, describing their bible passage epitaphs as the epitome of cultural schism with the indigenous culture's reverence for ancestral iwi. The author touches on the torrent of emotion that erupted in the late 1980s when developers of the Ritz-Carlton unearthed ancient Native Hawaiian burial grounds at Honokahua on Maui. With help from a soulful memoir written by noted cultural practitioner Charles Maxwell, she traces the subsequent formation of the burial councils and the Native Hawaiian reconstruction of funerary protocol. No, it's hardly news for local folks perhaps, but most would agree that the fact of the controversy meriting a chapter in a national publication goes a long way to underline Yalom's overarching theme that graves just aren't the quiet places that some would like them to be.
Mission Houses Museum has even elaborated further on this theme by inviting several prominent artists to create personalized visual interpretations of cemeteries and burial rites familiar to them from their own family backgrounds. The resulting exhibition on display in Mission Houses Chamberlain Galleries through Aug. 23 includes a slideshow of graveyard photography by Nanette Napoleon, who pauses before her work on a summer morning to note that Yalom's book has received a review in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine. She suggests that the national media attention perhaps signals a resurgence of interest in the relationship between the living and the dead. “People often come on my walking tours with a little but of fear but once we begin they are surprised at the peace they find. It's just a sign that we shouldn't be so standoffish when it comes to death.”
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