kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui

ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui is a Kanaka Maoli nationalist, scholar, aloha ‘āina advocate, poet and visual artist born in Kailua, Ko‘olaupoko, O‘ahu, and raised in Kaipuha‘a (Wailua Homesteads), Puna, Kaua‘i. She specializes in Hawaiian and Oceanic literatures, place-based writing and indigenous literacy. She is a former Ford Foundation pre-doctoral and doctoral fellow, and a Mellon Hawai‘i post-doctoral fellow. Her artwork, poetry and short fiction in Hawaiian and English have been internationally published and translated. ho’omanawanui is also a founding and chief editor of ‘Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, which features Native Hawaiian writers and artists

Voices of Fire: Reweaving the Literary Lei of Pele and Hiʻiaka seeks to restore literature about volcano goddess Pele and her youngest sister Hi‘iaka, patron of hula, to its rightful place in Native culture and identity.  Stories of Pele and Hi‘iaka are most familiar as a form of literary colonialism — first translated by missionary descendants and others, then co-opted by Hollywood and the tourism industry. Voices of Fire recovers the lost and often-suppressed political significance of this literature.

Comments

ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui artfully performs the cultural and intellectual labor of overturning dominant paradigms and creating new ways of seeing and being an Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) woman and member of the Lāhui (Nation) that draws inspiration from the volcano goddess Pele and her favored youngest sister Hi‘iaka, patron of hula. This is an important and exciting book. —

-- Ty P. Kawika Tengan, author of Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai'i