Hawaiian Mo'olelo as Sites of Resistance: Mele Oli and Temporality in Kimo Armitage's The Healers
Hawaiian Mo'olelo as Sites of Resistance: Mele Oli and Temporality in Kimo Armitage's The Healers

Summary/Abstract: In Beyond Settler Time, Mark Rifkin observes how dominant temporal frames of reference position Native peoples either in the past or in a settlerdefined present, thereby denaturalising Indigenous timespaces. My paper contends that the genre of adolescent literature participates in this process, as it is centred on stories of individuation, growth and maturation that are in sync with age-segregated Western temporality. Focusing on Indigenous narratives for young people in Hawai‘i, my paper suggests that Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories and histories) can serve as sites of resistance to settler time as they employ traditional modes of storytelling – such as mele oli (chants) – that foreground Native tempos, rhythms and genealogies. To illustrate the important function mo‘olelo can serve in affirming distinctly Indigenous sensations of time, I read Native Hawaiian author Kimo Armitage’s adolescent novel The Healers (2016) as a text that transcends Euro-American genre conventions. By integrating mele oli, Hawaiian mo‘olelo such as The Healers articulate the intergenerational expanse of Native temporality, defined by stories and genealogies that are carried in but exceed individual bodies and that link the ancient past with possible futures. This temporal vastness cannot fit within the much more confined timespace of Western individuation that serves as a defining factor of the adolescent literature genre. Hence, I posit, Native Hawaiian literary works for young readers, such as Armitage’s novel, can productively “unsettle” the dominant conventions of writing for adolescents and challenge us to imagine the rhythms and tonalities of becoming otherwise.

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