Book explores how history lives on as pain
"THEN THERE WERE NONE"
by Martha H. Noyes
Bess Press, hardback, $10.95
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
Writer Martha H. Noyes and filmmaker Elizabeth Lindsey Buyers met in Hollywood and were immediately drawn to each other: Both were from the Islands, and missing home. Both were seeking fame and fortune in a tough town.
As Noyes new book, "Then There Were None" is released, things they talked about that first day still resonate with them. It was a conversation that would bear much fruit, including the book — a small but well-designed piece, essentially the script of a film Noyes wrote with Buyers, matched with old photos from the state archives.
"What we're trying to say is the pain Hawaiians feel is real. It has consequences," Martha Noyes said
In spare but poetic English that matches the Hawaiian chants and poetry that are also part of the text, Noyes juxtaposes the photos with bits of history, anecdotes, excerpts from documents and other revealing information. The book, she writes in the introduction, "is not a history text. In neither the film nor the book have we attempted objectivity. What drove our work was the absence of material expressing the experience of being Hawaiian during the last two hundred years."
Back in 1985 in Hollywood, Noyes recalled, "both of us felt somehow diminished — less talented, less intelligent, less well-educated" — because of the attitudes of people who around them who couldn't see past stereotypes of carefree, happy Hawaiians.
Noyes recalls a meeting she had about a love story she wrote. A $10,000 contract was on the table. All she had to do was change the Hawaiians in the story to Caucasians. "I thought, 'I am so tired of tuna and rice, but I don't need the money that much.' I thanked him and left. I was in tears."
Noyes is not Hawaiian, but she has adoptive "aunties," and she has lived here nearly 30 years.
Her concern for Hawaiians is in part because of her own background: born in San Francisco in a home for unwed mothers, adopted by highly educated and well-traveled parents, living on the Mainland and in Europe before settling in Hawai'i in 1965, when she was a junior in high school. She once lived in the South, where she experienced prejudice partly because she was adopted and her ethnicity was a mystery. (She recently learned that she is French, Italian, German, Scottish and Iroquois.) When she arrived here, Noyes thought she wouldn't have to deal with racism anymore.
Buyers, a former Miss Hawai'i who has acted in TV and film and made several award-winning documentary films, was born and reared here. She returned from the Mainland about the same time as Noyes and lives in Hilo now.
The two kept in touch after they came home in the early 1990s. They worked on a KITV series, "Legacy of Light," and then on Buyers' film version of "Then There Were None," released in 1995. Buyers saw the film as a way of telling stories that, at that point, were little known, stories that Hawaiians had been unwilling to tell even to their children or grandchildren out of caution or shame, such as how the language was officially suppressed in the schools.
The film had a Public Broadcasting System outing around the country and won a Best Documentary prize at the Toronto Film Festival in 1997.
Buyers says she toured the country with the film and never encountered any controversy —Êuntil she got home. Last year, an experimental version of the film paired with music and limited narration caused a stir when it was presented by the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Advertiser music critic Gregory Shepherd condemned the work, and some patrons found it "inappropriate."
Buyers, who is somewhat surprised to still be talking about this film so many years after its release, said it was interesting to find out that even in Honolulu in 2002, "there are places where it's not yet safe for us."
"I thought we were in the process of building bridges of understanding," she said. "But we live in a duplicitous society where there is a great deal that has never been talked about. At least the incident was a catalyst for discussion, and I believe it's important for us to talk ... that's the only way healing can take place."
She also said the reaction by the Symphony audience might have had to do with the fact that most narration was omitted.
Noyes' book contains the lines they did not hear.
It was an extremely painful time for Buyers and Noyes, who nevertheless say the controversy only goes to their original point.
That point is this: What happened to Hawaiians — the overthrow of the monarchy, the denigration of their culture and religion, the deaths from imported diseases, the lack of political, social and economic power in plantation times — caused pain. Previous
generations masked that pain with an outward aloha spirit and an inner silence. The present generation is more likely to acknowledge anger and frustration born of that pain, but still experiences helplessness.
"What we're trying to say is the pain Hawaiians feel is real. It has consequences. These historical acts are the source of the pain. ... Until we acknowledge that the emotion exists, and it is justified, we are just running around trying to prove to each other whose history is better. And that's not the point," Noyes said.
Neither film nor book are meant as an indictment of any group. "I don't know if it benefits anyone to lay blame on people of another era," Noyes said. "There's a big difference between blaming people of the past and acknowledging that what occurred in the past caused pain."
Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2412.
