Aina Hanau / Birth Land
Aina Hanau / Birth Land
‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.
The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters.
‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children.
Brandy Nālani McDougall’s second collection of poetry ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a poetry that sings healing down to the realms of the occupied and to the people enduring the ruinous ‘gifts of Western civilization.’ Through intimate address to the poet’s own people and to her daughters, we behold a retelling of a creation story where birth is synonymous with ‘āina, where responsibility to land and community winds form and stanza into a ‘rope of resistance.’ Watching McDougall’s intimate act of reclamation and proud assertion of a sovereign heart, I am left in wakeful wonder of the connections of spirit to place, and of the poet’s kuleana to a practice of radical freedom that more than resists colonization—it dismantles it line by aloha ‘āina line.
Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a collection of poems that could only be written by an Indigenous Hawaiian mother; they fight to create space for Indigenous life. These are poems that speak to and for a community that contests the colonization of everything Hawaiian today—from language to bodies to home lands.
