BOOKS FOR KEIKI
'Aina' courageous take on Island culture
Dance for the 'Aina by Clemence McLaren; Bess Press, 2003. $9.95, Ages 11 and up
By James Rumford
I first met author Clemence McLaren in a Hawaiian conversation group at Ala Moana Beach Park. At that time, she had written several successful books for young adults that were set in Troy and ancient Greece. I did not know then that she was working on a book about Hawai'i, filled not with the tourist-attracting themes of crystal waves and rainbow-hued skies but with the unflattering themes of sovereignty and racism.
The book "Dance for the 'Aina" (originally published by Simon & Schuster under the title "Dance for the Land" and reviewed previously by Jolie Jean Cotton in this paper) is about Kate. She is a 12-year-old hapa-haole girl who has just moved to Hawai'i from California with her older brother and her widowed father. She is a clueless Mainlander, and has much to learn about the Islands. She also comes at a time when her uncle, a Hawaiian activist, is trying to raise people's awareness of the plight of Hawaiians.
Raising people's awareness is not only a theme of the book but is also an issue that McLaren had to deal with in getting her manuscript published in the first place.
While McLaren's editor at Simon & Schuster was enthusiastic about the manuscript, it took a fair amount of convincing — five years' worth — to get the publisher to agree to put out a book that took a long, hard look at a place most people want to believe is paradise. It seems that you can be as truthful and as raw as you want about Mainland inner cities, Mainland racism and Mainland ethnic values. Those kinds of books for young adults will sell. But a book about an unhappy girl in a hula skirt supposedly will not.
But McLaren and her editor persisted, and the publisher finally decided to give the book a try.
When the book came out, it received favorable reviews and showed strong sales. Even so, Simon & Schuster let the book go out of print. Somehow, they thought it had done as well as it was ever going to do.
Fortunately, Honolulu publisher Buddy Bess decided to snap it up and in so doing, gave McLaren the opportunity to refashion her book and speak not with the Mainland audience in mind but directly to the people she has lived and worked with for the past 20 years.
The first thing McLaren did was to supercharge the title. Instead of "Dance for the Land," the title became "Dance for the 'Aina," thereby making it clear to her reader what this book was about.
Next, she reinserted passages that her Mainland editor had deemed either unimportant or irrelevant and asked her to remove. In one such passage, Kate's father tells her that Hawaiians don't sit on the quilts they make. This may be unimportant to Mainlanders but significant to people in Hawai'i.
For other passages, McLaren was able to give more details and add more depth. In one of the final scenes of the book, where Kate and her family decide to resolve their differences by ho'oponopono, McLaren goes into more detail about the ancient Hawaiian process of reconciliation and shows that ho'oponopono is never a quick fix to problems but a path one takes to healing.
By expanding this scene, McClaren not only strengthens the book but counters a criticism by one Mainland reviewer who wrote that ho'oponopono was too facile an ending to the book. While the process of ho'oponopono may seem superficial, if not insincere, to a Mainlander, it is anything but that to the people of these Islands who practice it.
That Mainland reviewer can be forgiven for misunderstanding the culture here. The messages in McLaren's book cannot be expected to reach everybody.
Her book is like opening a window on these Islands. What you see depends on how willing you are to accept Hawai'i not as a rainbow-hued paradise but a down-to-earth place struggling with its past, trying to find its way into the future.
McLaren's Mainland version of the book was short-lived. Let us hope that the local edition is not, and that her book for young adults will encourage others to write honestly and forcefully about these Islands. Only in that way can we expect the youth of this state to grapple with the issues they must one day face.
James Rumford is an author and illustrator of children's books who lives in Manoa. He and Jolie Jean Cotton alternate in reviewing children's book on the first Sunday of each month.
