Author reveals her heart's desire
in a collection of essays

By Liza Simon / Ka Wai Ola

The Heart of Being Hawaiian
Watermark Publishing
246 pages, $16.95

Writers do what they do for any number of reasons: they enjoy the words, the solitude, the expression of ideas and imagery. And some, like Sally-Jo Keala-o-Ānuenue Bowman, treasure discovering wherever writing leads them.

In her newly published The Heart of Being Hawaiian, Bowman finds that writing leads home to her Native Hawaiian identity. With a true sojourner's spirit, she seemed to have sat at her word processor and let it take her back to interesting experiences — from her years as a Kamehameha boarder before the dawn of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance to more recent experiences of cultural awakening like intuiting a name for the gourd instrument she fashioned with the help of a kupuna. These diverse pieces – many already published locally in magazines, weren't intended to hang together. But they do, thanks to Bowman's unifying theme: her quest to find a soul-satisfying answer to the question that begged her soul for so long:

Just what does it mean to be Hawaiian these days?

By definitions of blood quantum and years spent removed from Hawaiian soil, Bowman describes the painful realization that she'd never measure up to being “pure.” It wasn't until she reached 10th grade, that a friend gave her a Hawaiian name, which means “the Path of the Rainbow”; to make the name stick, it took a few more decades and the comforting arms of two noted ho'oponopono practitioners. These are stories that appear in her new book. For this light-skinned Kailua girl of mixed Hawaiian ancestry and journalistic skills, which led her to temporarily leave Hawai'i for a career on the U.S. continent, a sense of Hawaiianness eventually changed from an occasional discomforting twinge to an everyday source of pride.

Most would agree that the issue of indigenous identity is a ponderous and political hot button these days; it's an issue in legal challenges to the constitutionality of Native Hawaiian government programs. Bowman's book takes a subtle poke at those behind these challenges who would have us mistake the protection of endangered indigenous identity with so-called “reverse racism.” The book's inscription presents Hawai'i state data on the generations of inter-racial marriage that have made these islands a “statistician's nightmare” — as she calls them, and even rendered concepts of race useless, Bowman notes.

In Bowman's breezy talk-story style, the quest for indigenous identity is a springboard for her own self-acceptance. This is also a lesson about self-love with universal application. While she didn't intend it as such, it speaks volumes about the divisiveness of calculable measures of racial extraction versus the health of bolstering native ties to land, language and lines of ancestry. Using the writer's craft of observing, describing and drawing connections, Bowman ultimately discovers that once you are grounded in cultural roots, you are immune to getting tangled up in outsiders' definitions' of your identity.

Bowman's journalism background enables her to add plenty factual minutiae that can be as deliciously entertaining as the story of the night the King of Thailand played saxophone with the Dixiecats at the bidding of then-Governor Quinn. (This is in a Washington Place essay that also details Queen Lili'uokalani's halcyon days in the same residence.) But the joy of Bowman's book is less about plot and more about that theme – an intrepidly honest writer's journey inside her own heart. And a very Hawaiian one it is.