Customer Reviews

Ono Ono Girl's Hula

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I wanted to give this book 0 stars, you know? Anyway, what got me was the character of the Native Hawaiian policeman whose only human quality was his sexual availability, and whose only character trait was his bad temper...and this made-up character was said by the author to typify Native Hawaiians! They used to call that kind of generality Racism. This book by someone who is not Native Hawaiian but uses Hawaiian language like a tourist is not what I expected and I didn't appreciate it. Thank you. --Pele Ah Chu

Ono Ono Girl's Hula ia a "loco moc" brew of mongrel identity politics, more or less, emanating as much from the grounds of cultural political struggle in contemporary Hawai'i as much as from the verbal flux of the diasporic Pacific Rim and the ethnic opportunism of California. I like it a lot, at times crazed and infuriated as I read the schizo-text of herstory; Carolyn Lau (who was a great Chinese poet in days past) is not Haunani Kay Trask and moments in the text when she aspires towards primordial ideological bullying are way off the mark. But when she lets the language flow and mix, she becomes one shameless hussy of mongrel postcolonialty, and it is worth it, dear reader, to go along for the poetic and sexual ride into the ono ono girl's blissy blessed hula.