Character Haiku: Char Siu
Now I’d rather be
sliding down a waterfall,
no cactus landing.
~Char Siu
Pele Dreams
Living in the shadow of a volcano, there were many nights when I imagined lava pouring down Haleakala’s mountain sides and pooling in the hall outside my bedroom door. My sister and I even had a game where the floor was white-hot lava and you had to leap to safety chair by coffee table by couch.
Our mother was not amused.
Like Californians and earthquakes, mid-westerners and tornadoes, Big Island residents know that someday Pele’s fires will dance again, a ticking time bomb on a geological time scale of a minute or millennia.
Developers and bankers want to think a hundred years or more. My grandfather was in the insurance biz when developers in the 1970s and ’80s wanted to build on lava flows. He refused.
“There’s a reason it’s a lava flow, Lehua. Never build on a lava flow or a dry river bed.”
Probably some of the best advice he ever gave me.
Book Review: Opium Dreams
by Kiana Davenport
If you scratched Kiana Davenport, beneath her sophisticated, erudite veneer I think you’d find the heartbeat of a no-nonsense Waimanalo titah, a contradiction that makes her work a delight to read.
I just finished Opium Dreams, volume three in her Pacific Stories collection, and like in her previous volumes Cannibal Nights and House of Skin, I found myself slipping into the skins of the narrators. You don’t read her stories so much as breathe them along with her characters. Her eye for the small telling detail that reveals epic amounts of information is exquisite and her deft handling of imagery often makes the prose sing like poetry.
Da titah can write. Period.
I’ve admired Kiana’s work for a long time. Her main characters are often mixed-raced Polynesian women trying to make a life for themselves on the margins of western culture. The women in her stories survive abuse, make poor choices, bow under the burdens of history and culture, and fall to the whims of turn-on-a-dime fate. They also seize life and triumph in ways large and small. They are spectacularly flawed, raw, and real. Kiana has the knack of taking something alien to most western experiences and making it universal.
In Opium Dreams, her stories are about anger and revenge, self-destruction, the inevitable consequences of action vs. inaction, and the grace of forgiveness. In Kiana’s worlds, family is who you chose, and that choice is everything.
Opium Dreams by Kiana Davenport is available as an eBook through Amazon and is her first foray into self-publishing. It’s a steal at 99 cents. Be sure to check out her other titles: House of Skin, Cannibal Nights, Shark Dialogues, House of Many Gods, Song of the Exile, and The Spy Lover. I guarantee you’ll be haunted by these characters’ lives for years.
Connect with Kiana Davenport
Blog: http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kiana.davenport
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BRAXTONRO
Learning ‘Ōlelo: sashimi
sashimi
(sah-SHEE-mee) (n) Japanese for thinly sliced raw fish. Often confused with sushi on the mainland.
Example
‘When Kalei’s head broke the surface of the large saltwater pool at Piko Point, all he was thinking about was thinly sliced sashimi fanned on a bed of green cabbage and the hot wasabi paste he would mix with shoyu to make a dipping sauce.’ ~ One Shark, No Swim
Note: ‘Ōlelo is a Hawaiian word meaning language, speech, word, etc. To see the current list of Hawaiian and Pidgin words, definitions, and usage please click on
Pidgin Dictionary
Character Haiku: Jay
A bikini smiles
sunlight on golden tan, the
whispered promise sure.
~Jay